Profile Evaluation/Advice: The Bleeding Heart

This year Harvard has changed the question into "Tell us about something you wish you had done better. (400 words)", so it seems to fit a bit more into a failure type category, but not exactly.

I have been toying with several options, but each of them seems to leave a major area of concern open or else not really address the question.

Then the direct INSEAD question "Describe a situation taken from your personal or professional life where you failed.
Discuss what you learned. (400 words maximum)" throws me for a loop as well. I think in a way the hardest part of that question is discussing what I learned.

400 words is honestly not enough to address these questions.

The current subject I am toying with is a college team project I had thought was successful at the time, but I realized later that I had not optimized my performance. I assumed my teammates were lazy/dumb (not including it in the essay, but one once said to me that she was just trying to keep a 1.7 so that she would not lose financial aide) so I took on all of the work myself. Now I realize that I missed an opportunity to learn ways to provide motivation.

The thing I like about this idea is that my success essay focuses on a time when I found a cost free motivation that more than doubled positive results. In this way I am able to circumvent the word limit in showing my improvement, and the two essays fit together nicely (perhaps too nicely?)

My concern is that it is not the classic take on a failure essay in that it is a missed opportunity. I don't know if it would be considered acceptable since nothing actually went wrong as the result of my actions (we got a good grade, I just did not learn). I also worry that I might not be portrayed as a good team player. This is not much of a concern with Harvard, since there is no personal statement, but I am going to town portraying myself as a self-confident strategist who lets nothing get in her way in the INSEAD personal statement. I wonder if that failure essay might push that image overboard.

EDIT: or perhaps the worst part is that I am portrayed as someone who did not take a chance. I imagine they prefer failure by doing to failure by not doing. There again, everyone else is most likely trying so hard to prove how much they try new things that it might break me out of the formula. Goodness, I am over-thinking this, I am going to get an ulcer.