I recently read about the increasing trend for employees to create blogs cataloguing the problems, dysfunctions and difficulties within their own companies. It was suggested by one blogger, who worked for a major IT company, that employees should be encouraged to create blogs about their organisation because it provided useful feedback for improvement, in terms of personnel development, product innovation and service. The downside, of course, is that anybody in cyberspace can access a blog, which means that the company's reputation and standing could be seriously undermined, and its competitive weaknesses highlighted and exploited. So why has this form of employee blogging developed? Is it just a consequence of the technology or is it something deeper?

In the non-blog world of business, senior managers hate to admit they are wrong, and certainly don't encourage their subordinates to surface problems for fear that their failures might implicate them. In the job-insecure world we all now inhabit, it is less likely than ever that employees will confront senior management with the problems or failures they experience at the proverbial "coalface", whether it is about particular people, products or systems. Keeping one's head down, getting on with the job and being perceived as a "company man/woman" is the only flavour of the business day.

I am not convinced that cyberspace blogging about work is the answer, but we do need ways of communicating bad working practices in whatever form they manifest themselves. We need an atmosphere in which people can come forward with their views of what works and what doesn't, without feeling they will be perceived as whingers. In the old days, it was the symbolic suggestion box, but this tended to be about new ideas rather than inefficient working practices or behaviour. What we need now is a climate in which we are prepared to admit we have made mistakes, outside of a blame culture, where fault finding is constructive and not punitive.

It is always uplifting to hear about our successes from our stakeholders, whether they are customers or suppliers or employees, and we all bask in the "psychological strokes" we get from this. But to truly develop, you need to be open to negative feedback too, even about your own performance. If the future of any business is in taking calculated risks, we have to also accept that we are likely to encounter obstacles in our journey toward our objectives, and will sometimes fail along the way. As Confucius remarked: "Our greatest honour is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall".

So, how do we create an atmosphere at work that reduces the fear of failure and begin to learn from our mistakes? Is it by intra-blogging, blogs within the organisation that don't go into cyberspace, but allow people free rein to vent about what doesn't work and what might? Is it by creating an atmosphere of experimentation at work, where individuals are free to challenge accepted practice in a structured way? In his book, Managing for the Future, management guru Peter Drucker claims this is the responsibility of the leader, whether it is the senior manager in a large multinational or the owner-manager in a small firm. He suggests that there are two main characteristics that distinguish a leader from what he terms a "misleader". First, that the leader has a "clearly defined mission and goals", epitomised by Winston Churchill during WWII. And second, that "an effective leader knows that he, and no-one else, is ultimately responsible... When things go wrong, and they always do, they do not blame others". On the other hand, misleaders "always go in for purges". Either you create a "blame culture" or a potentially constructive "learning organisation". If we had the right leaders in our businesses, we would not need the blog, we could own up to our failures and learn from them. As Henry Ford once said, "failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently".