Failing your way to success

It is nearly 38 years since I learnt to ride my first bike. I still remember the whole situation. It was a hot sunny summers day. My dad was by my side ready to catch me, poised to encourage and praise. Despite his support, even at 5, I had a nagging sense of I don't want to let my dad down and I won't to do this. The first time he let me go, I fell.

The second, third and fourth attempts ended in the same bundle of boy and bike. I must have fallen ten times. As the tears subsided, my Dad hugged me and said 'It is ok, try again....I know you can do it'. 

I picked myself up and tried again, wind behind me....I flew down the drive on my own! My dad cheering in the back ground.

My Dad knew I needed to learn to fail, to dust myself off, pick myself up and start again.

We all need to learn how to fail because we all still fail constantly. For me its about failing better, learning from the mistakes and growing as a person. It is OK to fall once and a while.

The simple truth is – no great success was ever achieved without failure. It may be one epic failure. Or a series of failures – such as  Edison 10,000 attempts to create a light bulb, Dyson’s 5,126 attempts to invent a bagless vacuum cleaner or learning to ride a bike. Whether we like it or not, failure is a necessary stepping stone to achieving success.

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” - Robert F. Kennedy

One thing I have learnt over the years; is you cannot know success unless you have failed. Trial and error are usually the prime means of solving life’s problems. Yet many people are afraid to undertake the trial because they’re too afraid of experiencing the error.

They make the mistake of believing that all error is wrong and harmful, when most of it is both helpful and necessary. Error provides the feedback that points the way to success. Only error pushes people to put together a new and better trial, leading through yet more errors and trials until they can ultimately find a viable and creative solution. To meet with an error is not to fail, but to take one more step on the path to final success. Have a look at this great clip, sometimes wisdom can be found in the strangest places…..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNXr5Alytg4&feature=player_embedded

Failing can be scary…the fear of failure can be crippling to an individual or company. Overcoming this fear can be enlightening, it can open the door to a company culture that embraces mistakes and says it is ok to make them; it is ok…if we learn from them.

Randy Pausch, was a college professor who became famous after giving his “last lecture” when he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In his classes, Pausch would give out an award called The First Penguin to the team that took the greatest risk – and failed. The award is inspired by that one penguin out of a whole flock up on dry land who is the first to jump in the water, knowing full well that there may be predators just below the surface. That penguin runs a risk but if no one jumps in first, the whole flock will starve on land.

‘Fail forward fast’. Tom Peters, the management guru, says that "in today’s business world, companies must fail forward fast". What he means is that the way we learn is by making mistakes. So if we want to learn at a faster pace, we must make mistakes at a faster pace. Alternative view might be to Learn Fast!

The ancient Greeks had a great way to overcome fear and achieve victory….when ancient Greek armies travelled across the sea to do battle, the first thing they would do after landing was to burn the boats, leaving them stranded. With no way to make it home besides victory, the resolve of the soldiers was strengthened. When success and failure are the only options, you have no choice but to follow through.

It is impossible to run an organisation without making a lot of mistakes. Innovation always entails failure.  Most new products and companies don’t survive.  And if you want creativity without failure, you kidding yourself.  It is also impossible to learn something new without making mistakes.

A scary thought, for example, because new surgeons have higher fatality rates than experienced surgeons – but new surgeons can only learn so much by reading, watching others, and practicing on cadavers.  The only way to learn to do the real thing is to do the real thing.   

Leaders and teams can “forgive and forget,” which may be temporarily comforting, but condemns people and systems to make the same mistakes over and over again. Or you can remember who made mistakes, hunt them down, humiliate them, and thus create climate of fear. Which results in low trust, low engagement and low profits!!!

In such situations, the game becomes avoiding the finger of blame rather than surfacing, understanding, and fixing mistakes. See my blog on 'How many of you are blamers'

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/how-many-you-blamers-sean-spurgin?trk=pulse_spock-articles 

Or you can Forgive and Remember, it is the philosophy that the best teams and organisations use. You forgive because it is impossible to run an organisation without making mistakes, and pointing fingers and holding grudges creates a climate of fear. You remember – and talk about the mistakes openly –so people can learn.

Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh recently tweeted this: “$1.6 million mistake on sister site @6pm.com. I guess that means no ice cream for me tonight.

Apparently an employee had made a mistake while updating the prices on the web site, which meant that for a whole day, no item could cost more than $49.95. Some of their items cost a lot more! Now what do you do? In many organisations, a mistake like this would be the starting point for a witch hunt. Who is responsible? How did they screw up? What would be an appropriate punishment?But this is not how they do business at Zappos. Tony Hsieh writes:

"To those of you asking if anybody was fired, the answer is no, nobody was fired – this was a learning experience for all of us. Even though our terms and conditions state that we do not need to fulfill orders that are placed due to pricing mistakes, and even though this mistake cost us over $1.6 million, we felt that the right thing to do for our customers was to eat the loss and fulfill all the orders that had been placed before we discovered the problem.....PS: To put an end to any further speculation about my tweet, I will also confirm that I did not, in fact, eat any ice cream on Sunday night"

What great leadership! This is not soft or wishy-washy, it is a great way to handle mistakes in a business. Rather than stigmatising failure, we should acknowledge and even celebrate it. Yes, that’s right, celebrate our mistakes. It will create a 'circle of safety' as Simon Sinek puts it!

So what can you do , here are some top tips I came across on my travels........

 1: When you celebrate mistakes, you learn more from the mistakes you make

In one company, the CEO was told by a trembling employee, that the company website was down. This was a big deal – this company made most of its sales online, and downtime cost them thousands of pounds an hour. The CEO asked what had happened, and was told that John in IT had bungled a system backup, and caused the problem. “Well, then,” says the CEO “Let’s go see John!”

When the CEO walked into the IT department everyone went quiet. They had a pretty good idea what was coming, and were sure it wouldn’t be pretty.

The CEO walks up to John’s desk and asks “You John?”

 “Yes” he says meekly.

 “John, ” says the CEO, “I want to thank you for finding this weakness in our system. Thanks to your actions, we can now learn from this, and fix the system, so something like this can’t happen in the future. Good work!” Then he left a visibly baffled John and an astounded IT department. That particular mistake never happened again.

When we can openly admit to screwing up without fear of reprisals, we’re more likely to fess up and learn from our mistakes. The other lesson here is, stories travel!!!

2: Don't blame, take accountability

Huge amounts of time and energy can be wasted in organisations on explaining why the mistakes that do happen are not my fault. This is pointless. Use the accountability ladder to help teams raise their ownership........

3: Failure often opens new doors

Also, failure is often the path to new, exciting opportunities that wouldn’t have appeared otherwise. Closing your eyes to failure means closing your eyes to these opportunities.

4: Don’t take failure personally. Failure is about behaviour, outcomes, and results. Failure is not a personality characteristic. Although what you do may not give you the result you wanted, it doesn’t mean you are a failure. Because you made a mistake, doesn’t mean that you are a failure. Don’t be so hard on yourself.  If nothing else, you know what doesn’t work. Failure is a judgement or evaluation of behaviour. Look at failure as an event or a happening, not as a person.

5: Do things differently. If what you are doing isn’t working, do something else. There is an old saying, “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got.” If you’re not getting the results you want, then you must do something different. Most people stop doing anything at all, and this guarantees they won’t be successful.

6: Learn fast, treat the experience as an opportunity to learn. Think of failure as a learning experience. What did you learn from the experience that will help you in the future? How can you use the experience to improve yourself or your situation? Ask yourself these questions:

1.  What was the mistake?
2. Why did it happen?
3. How could it have been prevented?
4. How can I do better next time?

Then use what you learned from the experience to do things differently so you get different results next time. Learn from the experience or ignore it.

7: Take action. Bold, decisive action. Do something scary. Fear of failure immobilises you. To overcome this fear, you must act. When you act, act boldly. Action gives you the power to change the circumstances or the situation. You must overcome the inertia by doing something. Dr. Robert Schuller asks, “What would you do if you knew you could not fail?” What could you achieve? Be brave and just do it. If it doesn’t work out the way you want, then do something else. But DO SOMETHING NOW".

8: When you celebrate mistakes, you make fewer mistakes

I know that a lot of people stick to the old saying “Failure is not an option”. But guess, what no matter how many times you repeat this maxim, failure remains an option. Closing your eyes to this fact only makes you more likely to fail. Putting pressure on people to always succeed makes mistakes more likely because:

• People who work under pressure are less effective
• People resist reporting bad news
• People close their eyes to signs of trouble
• people don't feel safe, which impacts trust

This is especially true when it’s backed up with punishment of those who make mistakes. Peter Drucker provocatively suggested that businesses should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them, because employees who never make mistakes never do anything interesting. Admitting that mistakes happen and celebrating them when they do, makes mistakes less likely.

James Dyson says this:

 "I made 5127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative…We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually".

So how about we start celebrating failures. Next time you or someone on your team messes up, admit it, celebrate it and learn from it. Tackle the situation with humour (as Tony Hsieh did) rather than with fear and shame.

How does your company handle mistakes? Is it more like a celebration or a witch hunt? How did you handle it and what did you learn from it?

 “If you’re not falling, you’re not trying hard enough.”