The "Fail early, fail fast" philosophy doesn't work unless you actually learn from failing.

I agree , you have to learn from the failure for that philosphy to work

You also have to be in a culture/environment which appreciates and encourages learning from failure, rather than placing blame. See what we do at Etsy. http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems

Thats quite an innovative way of handling problems