How Brinsa enhanced its quarterly leadership workshop with four leaders sharing their failures

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Four Brinsa leaders got on stage in Medellín to admit, in public, what didn't go as planned.

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Brinsa is a Colombian multinational specialized in salt chemistry, the company behind brands like Refisal and Blancox. Its leadership team meets every quarter for strategy workshops. This time was different.

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A private event in a hotel ballroom in Medellín, with 70 Brinsa leaders in the audience. They'd decided their next leadership workshop wouldn't include a single success story.

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This wasn't a motivational talk with outside speakers. It was people from inside the company — sales, logistics, production, culture — admitting in public to a project that fell apart.

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A team that spends its time talking strategy decided to talk about failure

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Brinsa's Strategy team puts it simply: "We're not that used to being a little informal at Brinsa. We're also new to starting to talk a bit about failure."‍

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That's what makes this exercise stand out. A technical company, built on industrial processes and quality standards, making room for vulnerability in the same format usually reserved for KPIs.

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Four leaders, four stories, one exercise

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The format was simple and demanding at once: four Brinsa leaders — some with up to 27 years running sales and logistics teams — prepared their failure stories using the Fuckup Nights methodology.

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Jose Manuel, in a public post about the experience, described what it meant to revisit a project that hadn't gone well:

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"Mistakes cost something. What matters is turning that cost into learning."‍

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That story alone produced five concrete lessons: align on communication and goals early, plan slowly so you can execute fast, manage risk from day one instead of waiting for it to become a problem, and get out into the field to test what gets designed from behind a desk. Nothing abstract — the kind of lessons an operations leader can apply the following week.

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What the 70 leaders in the room took away‍

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The feedback from attendees was consistent: this didn't feel like just another workshop exercise. One leader who was in the audience summed up the effect: 

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"Hearing my leaders and their experiences gives me confidence that there's a safe space here, and that collective intelligence is essential to grow both personally and professionally."‍

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Another attendee was more direct about what changes when failure gets told from the inside: "It makes us more sensitive to failure and helps us see how important it is to actually learn from it."‍

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Do your team leaders come across as trustworthy?‍

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For a Culture or People leader, the real challenge isn't getting people to show up to a workshop — it's getting something to actually change afterward. Brinsa was after something most offsites never touch: psychological safety that goes beyond a slide of corporate values.

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When 70 leaders watch four of their peers admit a mistakein front of everyone, it builds something a success story never could: permission to try, fail, and say so out loud. Brinsa’s Strategy team is already looking at this as a methodology they want to bring into future innovation exercises.

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That's the argument a Culture leader can bring to their director: Fuckup Nights offers a measurable way to lower the barrier to talking about failure before it turns into a bigger problem.

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How did Brinsa elevate its quarterly leadership workshop? By bringing four real failure stories, told by its own people. More than an outside speaker with inspiring quotes, it brought a technical company together to decide, out loud, that failure also has a place in the strategy room.‍

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If your leadership team needs a space like this too, find out how to bring Fuckup Nights to your organization at fuckupnights.com/at-work.

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