Yesterday, the Nubbel got burned in Cologne.
If you didn’t grow up here, that sentence sounds like either a crime report or a children’s book. In reality, it’s the city’s annual way of ending Karneval (carnival): a straw figure that has been hanging above pub doors for the “jecke” days gets put on trial, blamed for the collective nonsense, and then ceremonially set on fire.
And before you dismiss this as folklore: it’s probably one of the cleanest leadership mechanisms I know.
Many organizations don’t struggle with making mistakes. They struggle with what happens after. A failure lands, and then it stays. Not as a lesson. As a fog. Meetings keep circling the same story. People manage reputation instead of reality. The team becomes careful, political, tired. Organizational stress becomes the background noise and everyone pretends it’s “just the pace.”
Cologne does something different. It ends the story. Here’s the baseline, in case you’ve never seen it:
During Karneval, many pubs hang a straw effigy over the entrance: the Nubbel. He looks harmless, almost friendly. Symbolically, he absorbs the “sins” of the carnival days… too much drink, too much drama, too much ego, too much everything. On Carnival Tuesday night, the neighborhood gathers. There’s a mock trial. An “indictment.” People shout and laugh and pretend to be outraged. Then comes the call-and-response that every leadership team should borrow:
“Un wer is dat schuld?” (And who’s to blame?)
“Dä Nubbel!” (The Nubbel.)
And then he burns.
What this ritual does (under the comedy) is structured closure. It gives a community a way to name what went wrong, process it together, and move on without turning it into a personal vendetta or an endless post-mortem religion.
That’s the lens for the five leadership lessons that follow. Each one translates a piece of the burning of the Nubbel into organizational life: how to create closure, protect trust, switch modes cleanly, operationalize forgiveness, and still keep responsibility where it belongs.
Lesson 1: Learning Needs an Ending
In corporate life we talk about “learning.” A lot. And yet, if you watch what happens after a major miss (be it a product launch, client escalation, failed hire, strategy that looked intelligent until reality arrived) you’ll see something different: re-living.
Teams gather, everyone has an angle, and the story is told again. And again. Sometimes the story gets sharper with retelling. Sometimes it gets softer. Often it gets political. But the core stays: the mistake becomes a shared reference point that never fully closes.
The team becomes fluent in its own failure. That fluency feels like seriousness and responsibility. It feels like “we won’t let that happen again.” But often it’s simply the expression of an organization that doesn’t know how to metabolize a bruise.
Bruises don’t disappear by discussion. They disappear by healing. And healing needs clarity and time. Many teams do the clarity part halfway, then deny the time part, then wonder why everyone still flinches.
This is where the Jecke (the people that celebrate carnival) in Cologne are smarter than most post-mortems.
The ritual of burning the Nubbel creates a shared container: yes, we talk about what went wrong. Yes, we exaggerate. Yes, we perform a little. But the performance is processing and not denial. And then: We let it burn. The chapter ends here. Not because it was fine but because it happened. Because we’ve extracted what’s useful. Because carrying the rest is just weight.
In leadership terms: you need closure moments that are explicit, not implied.
Teams often keep failures alive because it gives them a strange sense of control. If the past stays open, we can keep “working on it.” If it stays open, we don’t have to risk a new decision. The failure becomes a shelter from uncertainty: a familiar pain that feels safer than unfamiliar responsibility.
You don’t need more “lessons learned.” You need a reliable way to end the emotional contract with yesterday.
Lesson 2: No Scapegoats, but One Scapegoat
The Nubbel is a scapegoat, yes… but importantly, it’s a non-human scapegoat. No one’s career is ruined. No one is publicly sacrificed. The social fabric remains intact.
And still, something gets acknowledged: people behaved badly, overdid it, got sloppy, blamed others, made silly decisions, maybe even enjoyed the chaos too much. The ritual doesn’t deny that. It allows the community to say it out loud together without turning on each other. Now compare that to how organizations do accountability.
Many companies put accountability in line with punishment. They say ownership, but they mean find the person. They say root cause, but they mean who touched it last. The result is predictable: people stop speaking plainly. Bad news becomes delayed, softened, translated, hidden inside nice formatting. If honesty gets punished, truth becomes a negotiation.
This is where the Nubbel offers a more serious leadership trick than it first appears: create a way to blame something without destroying someone.
In org terms, the “something” should usually be the system: incentives, unclear roles, brittle processes, missing context, leadership ambiguity, unrealistic timelines, the pressure to look competent instead of being accurate.
Sometimes a person did mess up. Of course. But even then, the leadership question is rarely “how do we shame this person?” The question is: what did we normalize that made this error likely?
The Nubbel ritual is effectively saying: “We’re not going to pretend this was no one. But we’re also not going to turn this into a public execution.”
And that in turn is protecting one key asset within organizations: trust. A team that trusts each other can learn fast because it can speak. A team that fears each other learns slow because it pretends. Use your Nubbel, but make it straw. Make it impersonal. Make it about patterns, not personalities.
Lesson 3: Cadence Over Chaos
The most underrated part of this tradition is the transition. Carnival is sanctioned chaos. We all know this isn’t normal… and that’s the point. And then it ends. Hard. With a public punctuation mark. The morning after the burning is Aschermittwoch (Ash Wednesday) and you can feel the return of the ordinary… almost immediately.
And looking at the corporate world again, high-performance isn’t intensity alone but also rhythm and cadence. And many organizations have no rhythm. They have a permanent blur of states: exploration mixed with execution mixed with politics mixed with… permanent half-chaos.
If you want to build teams that can deliver, you need explicit mode switches:
- A mode where experimentation is allowed
- A mode where delivery is sacred
Most conflicts I’ve seen in “dynamic environments” are conflicts about modes. One person is speaking as if the team is in execution mode. Another is acting as if the team is in experimentation mode. They both think the other is incompetent. They’re actually just unsynchronized.
The Nubbel burning is a synchronization. It says: “The wild period is over. We’re switching back.” And because it’s communal, everyone hears it at the same time. That matters.
Organizations love vague transitions. “We’re shifting into delivery.” “We need to operationalize.” “Now we focus.” That language is fog. It lets everyone interpret the shift in a way that suits them… which translates to no one shifts. You need to mark your transitions out loud. Publicly. With a ritual that feels almost embarrassing in its clarity.
Lesson 4: Don’t Keep the File Open
Many say they want a “healthy failure culture.” Then, the first time something goes wrong, they do the exact opposite of what they preach. Suddenly everyone is asking questions that are indirectly (sometimes very directly) seeking to blame someone.
And then the protection race starts. People start collecting screenshots and email. Protocols are being reviewed. Updates are sent around. Tone changes in emails to almost feel written by a lawyer.
Everyone start to build up their defense to not be the person associated with the mistake. Every single action becomes careful.
Cologne has a different mechanism: forgiveness is built into the calendar.
The sins of carnival are acknowledged, mourned, externalized, and then ceremonially dismissed. It doesn’t mean “no consequences.” It means: the community refuses to let a temporary collective mess become a permanent moral stain.
The damage of lingering blame is ruled out by a single event.
And as an organization you don’t want blame as part of the environment. Blame reduces cognitive bandwidth. It encourages defensiveness. It makes people optimize for personal safety instead of shared progress. And it turns every future decision into a one that is based on fear.
Forgiveness, in serious organizations, is therefore not about being nice but to restore the ability to act. However, forgiveness must be earned through clarity and the sequence to do so is:
truth → learning → repair → closureIn practical terms, forgiveness means this: once you have done the work (named what happened plainly, extracted the few lessons that actually matter, changed something in the system, clarified expectations) then you stop referencing the failure as an instrument of blame.
You don’t keep bringing it up in meetings as a subtle reminder of who “should have known better.” You don’t keep punishing the person who took the risk. You don’t keep operating as if the mistake is still happening. You simply close it.
Because if you don’t you are developing a shame culture that leads to hiding instead of progress.
Lesson 5: You can burn the wrong thing
The Nubbel is useful because it gives a group a place to put the emotional mess. He is not useful if he becomes the place where responsibility goes to die.
In organizations, the default move after a failure is usually one of two extremes:
- Either we turn it into a blame hunt,
- Or we turn it into a cleansing ritual where everyone feels better and nothing changes.
If you want the promise of the Nubbel to hold, you need a simple rule: You can burn the guilt. You cannot burn the obligation.
What obligation? Someone still has to name, in plain words, what happened. Someone still has to point to the decision that created the exposure, the assumption that went untested, the handover that was sloppy, the incentive that rewarded the wrong action. Someone still has to change the conditions so the same pattern becomes less likely next time. And someone still has to own that change, with a date attached.
Otherwise, your closure ends up being mood management. So the burn comes after the work. Not instead of it.
When you get this right, you earn something rare: a team that can recover fast without becoming cynical, and a culture where people don’t hide mistakes because they expect either punishment or performative forgiveness.
The balance is clean ending, clear responsibility, forward progress.
End of Story
Yesterday the people in Cologne did something I almost never see in organizations: they finished the thing. Finished like we stopped poisoning tomorrow with yesterday.
That’s what the Nubbel is really for. It’s a piece of cultural engineering wrapped in a carnival costume: closure as a public act, trust protected by design, a clean switch back to normal life, forgiveness that doesn’t turn into weakness, and a final reminder that responsibility still belongs to each one of us.
If you lead a team, you probably have your own Nubbel already. It’s the incident that keeps resurfacing in half-jokes, cautious emails, and “just to be safe” processes. The story everyone knows. The story nobody wants to reopen, yet somehow it reopens itself.
So do one simple thing: give it a proper ending.
Say the truth once, clearly. Decide what actually changes. Name who owns that change. Then close the file so it stops living in people’s nervous systems.
Probably the best way to wrap up this is by quoting a line from the song “Leechterloh” (ablaze) by the band Kasalla, who lets the Nubbel say the quiet part out loud:
“Hück Naach muss ich stirve für der Driss der ihr jemaat.”
(“Tonight, I have to die for the mess you made.”)
The goal isn’t to become a team that never messes up. The goal is to become a team that can mess up, recover fast, and keep its dignity.