Flearn Workshop
Learn the best lessons from the worst moments, with your peers.
❌ Keep your mistakes to yourself? “No one else would have stuffed up like that!”
❌ Feel alone with your f&!k ups? “Everyone else seems to have it together!”
❌ See the same mistakes happening in your team, organisation or industry? “And nobody talks about them!”
❌ Dread the thought of sitting through a ‘post project review’? “No one wants to be the one who f&!ked up.”
❌ Worry that admitting mistakes will undermine your credibility? “I’ve spent my whole career getting things right. I can’t afford to look like I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Flearn builds the psychological safety your team needs to collaborate honestly, learn faster and make better decisions together.
Flearn is a peer-to-peer workshop. Jacinta facilitates, but the learning comes from the room. In a structured 2-hour session for groups of 12 to 30 people, participants take turns sharing a f&!k up — and naming the Flearn that came from it. Each story gets airtime, then a lesson is drawn out and captured. It’s designed so things don’t spiral: the focus moves quickly from what went wrong to what you took from it.
It works in person and online. How Flearn helps you and your organisationJacinta makes Flearn safe, energising, practical and fun. No spin. No performance. Just real, raw “oh-my-god-you-too?” aha moments. You
- Realise you’re not alone.
- Everyone’s got a story, and they’re just as messy as yours.
- See failure differently—not as a career-ending disaster, but as a font of wisdom.
- Benefit from learning from others’ f&!k ups first, instead of repeating the same mistakes.
The result: a team with stronger psychological safety, better equipped to collaborate, innovate and learn from what goes wrong.
- Courage to share your f&!k ups in the future
- Newfound confidence to embrace failure for learning
- Authentic professional connections built on vulnerability
- Sharpened insight to avoid repeating f&!k ups
- A treasure trove of Flearns to fuel smarter decisions
✔ Have a f&!k up that you are comfortable sharing
✔ Want to listen to and learn from others
✔ Believe learning can be fun, even if it's uncomfortable
Flearn is NOT for you if you:
✘ Expect to just listen to a presenter or panel
✘ Want to blame and gossip
✘ Whinge
Flearn is delivered on site at your workplace, designed around your team and your culture.
A team with stronger psychological safety, better equipped to collaborate, innovate and learn from what goes wrong.
This includes everything you need before, during and after the workshop:
What people say
🎥 Watch Ellie’s quick video feedback on her Flearn experience.
“I’ve been to a lot of conference sessions over my years and that was by far the best workshop I’ve done so far. I loved learning from each other’s flearns!”
Ellie, IAP2 24 conference delegate
“The Flearn workshop gave me a safe and energising space to reflect, learn, and grow. It was a great opportunity to connect with other engagement professionals, share experiences, and gain new insights to apply to my work.”
Michele Barry, Plantek
“I really enjoyed sharing our failures as a learning opportunity. There wasn't any finger pointing. Instead, lots of laughs and acknowledgement of failure being a pathway to success and knowledge. What a great way to reframe our sector, given so many of us are perfectionists!”
Elizabeth McMahon, Arup
“The workshop on f**k ups was one of the best learning experiences I have ever been to!”
“The collective ‘flearning’ shows that we’re not alone in this.”
“It was so beneficial hearing from really experienced people – we’re all learning.”
“It felt safe to share and listen to f&!k ups.”
“A great session. The structure kept it from going into the detail of the trauma and packaged the Flearns up for us all at the end.”
“I thought I might just vent, but it’s about contributing to culture change.”
“No matter how long you’ve been in the industry, you make mistakes and that’s okay, because otherwise you can’t learn.”
Will people actually open up?
Jacinta designs the session so opening up feels like the obvious thing to do, not the brave thing. You don’t need a “vulnerable culture” already in place — Flearn can be the thing that starts it.
What if my team won’t go there?
The structure does the heavy lifting. Clear boundaries, a skilled facilitator, and watching someone senior go first — it changes the temperature in the room faster than you’d expect.
What about junior staff sharing in front of their manager?
Junior or senior, you bring what you’re comfortable sharing. Flearn meets you there. Ground rules are set from the start, hierarchy gets left at the door, and the focus moves quickly from “here’s what went wrong” to “here’s what I took from it.” That reframe protects everyone.
Is this just a venting session?
No. Each f&!k up gets airtime, then a Flearn — a named, captured lesson — is drawn from it. Turn failure into fuel for smarter decisions, without reliving the worst moments over and over. People leave with real insights, not just relief.
Can we run it for our whole organisation, or just a team?
Flearn works for cross-functional groups across different teams and disciplines, as well as focused team sessions. Jacinta will help you work out the right configuration for your culture and goals.
Photos: Flearners in action at the IAP2 Australasia Conference 2024
Your Flearn facilitator
Jacinta Cubis is a (fl)awesome facilitator - flawed + awesome.
She has emerged from her own f&!k ups bruised but otherwise alive and well. She looks forward to flearning with you!
Jacinta works with teams and organisations to create conversations that count. People feel safe to say what they really think in her workshops — not what they think they should say.
With 30 years of experience designing and facilitating group conversations, Jacinta brings genuine warmth, sharp structure, and her real self to the room — so the people in it can be themselves too.
She’s not asking anything of the room she hasn’t asked of herself.
Flearn has been run with cross-functional groups of professionals from different industries and disciplines — engineers, planners, communicators, strategists — where the only thing people had in common was a willingness to be honest. It has also been delivered in-house for organisations bringing together people from different teams and professional backgrounds.
Jacinta lives in Narrm/Melbourne, on unceded Wurrundjeri Country, and works anywhere - online and on-site. When Jacinta is not facilitating, or helping you learn how, she practices yoga, trains in calisthenics, paints in her art studio, plays tennis and gets around on two wheels.
"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself."