📚 Brains & Books | December

This month, we’re reading The Burnt Cookie by Benjamin Asher Mandel. 🍪

Mistakes happen. Plans fail. Things don't always turn out the way we intended. But what happens next can tell us a lot about the culture of a team or organization.

The Burnt Cookie challenges us to look beyond blame and think differently about failure. Using the “burnt cookie” as a framework, we'll explore how people, processes, and systems all contribute to outcomes—and how leaders can create environments where mistakes become opportunities to learn and improve without removing accountability.

For our Brains & Books conversation, we'll dig into failure, accountability, psychological safety, organizational culture, and how we respond when something goes wrong.

Do we hide mistakes? Fix them quietly? Find someone to blame? Or create space to examine what happened and do better next time?