The art of failing

The Japanese art form called “Kintsugi” (or Kintsukuroi =golden repair) has always fascinated me. Broken pottery is repaired using a mix of lacquer and powdered gold,silver or platinum, to make a one-of-a-kind ceramic. Through embracing the cracks and imperfect flaws, Japanese highlight the repair as an event in the lifetime of this object and accept that change is inevitable.

What about the imperfect moments and cracks we experience in our life? Failing in the public eye is associated with a good amount of embarrassment and humiliation, not a broad stroke of golden opportunity. As research has shown, feeling lowered in the eyes of others is one of the most intense emotions we can experience (Otten & Jonas, 2013). A pretty alienating and isolating experience. Not an experience that we would normally seek out and embrace.

No wonder we like to focus almost solely on success stories, quick wins, and best-case scenarios. Whether it’s business schools, consulting firms or leaders of your organization, we simply “undersample failure”, as Prof. Denrell from Warwick University argues in his research. By focusing only on successes, we are led to a variety of false beliefs about effective management or leadership. If we do not include factors that led to failure, we assemble a misleading picture of the determinants of corporate performance.

What if we could take the shame and humiliating feeling out of failure and finally embrace it for the value that Kintsugi prescribes its imperfect pottery pieces: an honorable part of our story and a way to learn and improve.

Role models of embracing failure

Certain pockets of people are paving the way. If you spend a day with elite athletes, you will see that they don’t shy away from failing. In fact, they learned to instrumentalize failure as a development tool.

Athletes and the sports industry have built a culture that internalizes micro-failures as part of the improvement cycle. Without the feedback and the setbacks, you don’t get better.

Bobby Carrington, former professional U.S. baseball player and now business development manager at a tech company in the Netherlands, recalls:

“From my experience in the business context, strategic goals are often very abstract. As an athlete, you work much more self-directed and take your overarching goal and weaknesses apart into smaller pieces. You look at all these moving pieces and try to find ways to optimize your performance. In doing so, you fail again, and again. In fact, you get used to it that it becomes a part of who you are and how you work. You approach and lean into failure because you want to learn from it and you make sure to only dwell on what you can actually do to improve." 

The creative and entrepreneurial space has overcome failures through ritualizing concepts like failure post-mortems, or start-up funerals. Believe it or not, there is even a conference to learn from and prepare for failure – called FailCon, and a Failure Institute. Global concept nights like “Fuck-Up nights” which originated out of Mexico have quickly spread like wildfire, bearing the thought that sharing your moments of failure might alleviate some of the pain. After all, if someone else learns from your mistakes, doesn’t it take away part of the pain of failure?

Amrei Andrasch, a conceptual design entrepreneur based in Berlin, describes her own experience of embracing failure:

“A teacher during my design studies taught me to look at the small things that happen while failing to make a perfect ink illustration. These small mistakes seemed really disturbing in the beginning but when I switched my point of view to let go of my perfectionism and played more, a completely new style appeared. experience I learned to look at ?failures“ in business like iteration loops in a design process. Out of this experiment developed a new and fulfilling direction in my current work - like the ink that dropped on my page.”

Failing forward

While the sport and the creative industries seem to have fostered a culture of failing forward (i.e., embracing failure for its learning moments and then moving on swiftly), many organizational cultures are rather stuck in sweeping failures under the rug. Leaders are rewarded and promoted for the virtue of building successful businesses, developing new ground-breaking products or building phenomenal service offerings. With the latest push of creating cultures of innovation to battle the ever-growing fear of being disrupted, a culture that cannot celebrate its failures on the way to new successes won’t encourage the right behavior and attitudes in its people. Iterative processes and quick idea tests build on learning by failing, … failing fast and forward.

This is a cultural challenge many organizations aren’t addressing when they are sprinting to novel solutions or building innovation champions. If systems, structures and processes aren’t congruent to the behavior that you are trying to foster, employees will quickly hit institutional barriers that will frustrate them and push them back to old habits. How will you dare to be creative and think outside the box, if a single failure might risk your career or reputation?

But when you fail, who and what do you blame?

Besides the (positive or negative) influence of the organizational culture we are embedded in, there is also an individual difference in how we reason and cope with failure. Causal attribution theory tries to explain how people understand the causes for their success and failures. This social cognitive theory by Bernhard Weiner states that what we deem to be the reason for our results greatly influences our motivation and achievement. It is characterized by three dimensions:

• Do you believe that your behaviour is guided by external, i.e. fate, luck, or internal factors, i.e. ability, effort (locus of control)?
• Do you believe that it is highly probable for the result to happen again (stability)?
• Do you believe that it was within your power to control the result (controllability)?

When we fail, we subconsciously examine our result along these three dimensions. The outcome of this quick assessment has consequences for how we deal with many situations in life (such as crappy feedback from our peers, a failed exam, or a lousy business pitch).

Let’s say you just miserably blew a presentation about a new product idea. If you believe that a) the reasons you failed were due to your lacking talent and ability, that b) you would probably have the same outcome next time you try and that c) talent isn’t something you can control, it is very unlikely for you to be motivated to try again.

5 Ways to get started

To embrace failure for its learning potential and path towards greater success, there are five things you can do as a leader to get started.

1. Be a role model    

· Gradually take away the shame and embarrassment that is associated with failure within your organization by setting an example.

·  Share past moments of failures and what you learned from it.

2. Test and experiment

· Instead of pointing fingers or playing blame-games, use failures as a fertilizer for iterative design sprints to test new assumptions and incorporate learning.

3.     Tell the untold stories

·  Build a group of trusted peers that share honest and authentic stories of leadership failures and provide constructive feedback.

Communicate failure stories internally and stress the valuable lessons learned

4.     Focus your feedback and evaluation on effort

·When you evaluate and provide feedback, focus on effort and controllable variables to motivate your staff to try again

·Ask and brainstorm what could have affected a less than optimal preparation and performance – and what could be done differently next time

5.     Assess your organization’s readiness to embrace failure

· Take surveys that include questions on the climate of psychological safety: e.g. “How confident are you that you won’t receive retaliation or criticism if you admit an error or make a mistake?” “How confident are you that you will still be considered for a promotion if you publicly share failure learnings?”

Utilizing failure as a signal for change and an instrument for insights will not break organizations but rather bond them closer together with golden glue of trust and authenticity . Just like Kintsugi pottery, the stories we tell ourselves will be shaped by the events we chose to highlight.

Why don't we brush a bit of gold or silver on our cracks and imperfections in 2018?

About the author:

Susan Salzbrenner is more than happy to admit that she is rather skilled at failing quickly, especially when it comes to spreadsheets, baking or table tennis. The organizational psychologist has been working for the past 10 years with global leadership development and cultural change projects with clients around the globe. She is currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark where she works as a senior management consultant for Implement Consulting Group