Many organizations—and their leaders—don’t recognize the value of trial and error. They want the Moon shot to succeed, perfectly, the first time.

But as Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, our internal think tank, describes, embracing “experimentation, fast learning, adaptation, and innovation,” especially on big “super-projects,” can make long-term success more likely.

NASA, which has been dealing since 1958 with the challenges and (sometimes) chaos of trying to put people and machines in space, can attest to that.

Failure Is An Option, And Sometimes It’s Necessary

Few projects have been bigger than the early U.S. space program, sparked initially by the then Soviet Union’s 1957 Sputnik launch and then by President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to land U.S. astronauts on the Moon and safely return them to Earth.

The U.S. space program encountered numerous setbacks and failures, both before and since the July 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing—most tragically, the Apollo 1 fire during a pre-launch test in 1967, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, and the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, each of which resulted in multiple fatalities.

The ultimate test for any organization or team, however, is whether it is capable of analyzing the source (or sources) of such failures, correct the problem(s), and move forward.

What isn’t an option—and shouldn’t be an option—is wallowing in failure. As Robert (Bob) Gibbs, NASA’s Assistant Administrator for mission support until his recent retirement, told me recently, whether an organization benefits from failure, or gets dragged down by it, largely depends on how its leadership reacts to setbacks.