Failing Fast -- and Learning to Grow

We all work to be successful, and failure can seem like a setback. But failure, whether it is large or small, can be a rite of passage to ultimately achieving success. Acknowledging failure helps it become a learning tool; ignoring or hiding it helps nothing.

At our recent Lockheed Martin Communications summit, we brought the idea of “fail fast and grow” front and center to our discussions about a growth mindset. There is something to the adage, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Let me suggest a slight edit to that: If at first you don’t succeed, learn from it and try again.

Take athletes, for example. The greatest athletes are constantly looking for how they can improve, and accept that failure is part of the process and path to success. If they gave up when they reached their first obstacle, sports wouldn’t be very interesting for anyone. Overcoming adversity is part of the allure and what many of us root for in our favorite athletes.

Tennis great Serena Williams says she learns more from losing than from winning. And World Cup soccer champion Abby Wambach writes in her book Wolfpack: “Failure is not something to be ashamed of… Failure is something to be powered by.”

The path to success is not linear and learning from failure — or using it as motivation — plays an important role in our ultimate success.

There’s no shortage of successful people talking about the importance of failure. Brené Brown, research professor at the University of Houston (and my fellow Texan) puts it bluntly: “There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.”?

Our world is constantly changing. We see that clearly in business, the environment, politics and society. What worked last year may lead to failure today. Companies or teams that refuse to change, or that don’t respond to the changes around them, are not going to succeed. We have to take what works, leave what doesn’t — learn, and keep on going.

So let’s think about failure.

There are degrees of failure. You don’t have to fail spectacularly for a failure to help you grow or lead you to success. Small failures often come with big takeaways.

“Failing fast” is a good thing. Failure is an important part in any company’s continuous improvement journey, and that’s true for us at Lockheed Martin. It’s a concept familiar to our engineering colleagues because it’s a way to determine quickly what’s working, and what’s not. The sooner you realize a failure, the sooner you can learn from it, pivot and move on.

Failure happens. Really. No one likes to fail, and failure can be scary. Even talking about a previous failure can feel uncomfortable. But we need to acknowledge failure and learn from mistakes. If we don’t, we can’t move forward the way we should.

There’s no shame in failing. The only actual failure is if you fail to learn from it.

One powerful example of learning from failure comes from my experience at NASA. After the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986, the agency received criticism for "circling the wagons" -- or being less-than-transparent about the mistakes leading up to the disaster. By the time I arrived at NASA in 2003, in the aftermath of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident, the agency had learned from that experience and adopted a much different posture. We were committed to sharing information, acknowledging missteps and learning from the technical and process decisions that led up to the accident. The Columbia response is now seen as a best practice in crisis communications.

How have you or your organization learned from failure??