Failure is just feedback

We’ve been looking at failure all wrong. School and the workplace condition us to think all failure is bad. But failure is just feedback. Data to tell us whether something worked or didn't.

Some failures are unpleasant and best avoided to be sure, others are good to have and in the right doses, help us get more important stuff done. What causes us to feel bad about failure is what our beliefs tell us it means.

If you believe because you have a senior role you need to have all the answers, and if you don't then that's bad, then a failure will feel awful, shitty and best avoided.

If you believe no one has all the answers and failure is just feedback to learn and grow from, then it will feel less bad and more like an opportunity which is good.

Failure gives us a choice: whether to update our knowledge and skills or ignore it and keep believing what we’ve always believed.

"I’ve not failed 10,000 times. I’ve not failed once. I’ve succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways won’t work." Thomas Edison

Harvard professor Amy Edmondson has studied failure closely and found there are three types:

1. Preventable failures - deviation from outcomes we expect that are controllable. Checklists, training and processes help here. These are not so good if repeated.
2. Unavoidable failures - arise from unique combinations of needs, people, and problems in complex systems. Not always controllable. Awareness and readiness to respond helps here.
3. Intelligent failures - at the frontier and provides valuable information when developing or discovering what doesn’t exist today. Controlling the scope and scale of potential failures is key here, and having a culture that suspends judgement and focuses on curiosity and action.

Better understanding the type of failures may just be the key to unlocking your fears of making them.

It could help shift your mindset from kicking yourself in the ass all the time, to giving yourself the occasional pat on the back, and help you achieve more of what matters to you.