Fear of Failure

There are three major stumbling blocks when applying human centered design principles to problem solving:

1. Fear and discomfort caused by the perception of mess and chaos.
2. The curse of expertise.
3. Fear of failure.

Over the last few years a lot has been written about failure, how important it is to fail fast and often and how each failure is one step closer to success. However, I’ve noticed that for many it’s still just a nice thought or inspiring words but has yet to become an applied principle. Too many people keep muddling through their work and don’t accept failure for what it is - a vital paver in the path toward true success. 

Enough is Enough

But enough is enough: it’s time to really start admitting when we make mistakes and fail, celebrate the failure, learn from it, and move on. And it’s time to stop slamming people when they do fail. We live in a culture now where we either convince each other that we’re not making mistakes (usually people we live or work closely with) or we take the first sign of weakness and attack in virtual hordes of trolls (usually folks we either work for, work for us, or don’t personally know). We’re too quick to either say “don’t worry, that wasn’t your fault” or “I think this is fine” or “you’re as bad as [fill in here some famously horrible person you hate here].” 

In his book The Culture Code, author Dan Coyle writes that leaders need to be honest and say stuff like “I really screwed that one up and here’s what I learned.” I haven’t read the book, but I did listen to Dan Pink interview Coyle on his podcast and he listed three things highly successful groups do: 1) use signals of connection to create a safe environment; 2) share accurate information, being vulnerable with each other; 3) have a shared direction and purpose. Of those three things, sharing accurate information - good or bad - is done when people aren’t afraid to admit mistakes and failures.

We All Fail

Throughout life we all fail, personally and professionally. Life is difficult and we’re all pretty bad at making great decisions all the time. The day after I graduated from high school (in the early '90s) I experienced a serious failure and was lucky enough to learn a great lesson from it. I woke up early to go for a hike in a nearby canyon to an ancient juniper tree in northern Utah. Local botanists at Utah State University estimate that the tree is over 2,000 years old. With me was the girl who, at the time, I was attempting to woo with my wilderness skills (speaking of embarrassing failures). It was a beautiful day and we had fun. Once we were back to the trail head, the target of my unrequited affection asked if she could drive us back to her house where I would drop her off and then go to my job at a dairy. Of course I agreed (ignoring the nudge my conscience gave me as I handed her the keys to my mother’s new car we’d taken to the trail head). The crash was inevitable and thankfully no one was seriously injured. Once I determined that nobody was hurt, a vision of my father appeared in my head, thundering about my choice to let someone else drive. The tow truck driver dropped me off at my house just in time for me to borrow my sisters bike (the day couldn’t get any worse, right?) and ride to work before my dad came home. I was just starting to relax as I milked the cows when my father walked in. I tensed, waiting for the well-deserved berating, convinced I’d be milking cows the rest of my life to pay for a new car but he smiled and just asked me “did you learn anything?” After I explained that I learned that you should drive defensively and that you should never let your not-yet-girlfriend drive your mom’s car, he told me he was glad nobody was hurt and then he left. (He probably would have hugged me too except I was wearing my work clothes that were flecked with mud, water, and other more disgusting things one comes into contact with on a farm while milking cows.)

He didn’t throw blame at the driver of the other car. He didn’t berate me for a poor decision. He didn’t complain about my date’s driving skills. He gently forced me to face what had happened, take responsibility, work through some introspection, admit the mistake and realize the important lessons.  

Failure is Essential

On my team we do a few things to battle the misconception that failure is bad. We keep a large whiteboard in our work area on which we record failures - and we include names. Sometimes it gets hijacked and we erase the failures. We’re working to make it a mark of pride when a name is on the board. If your name isn’t on the board we all know that you’re either 1) not being innovative or creative or 2) you’re lying or deceiving yourself and others about your success. 

Recently a failure of mine was recorded on the whiteboard. The problem with that failure is that we had warning signs early in the project that our approach wasn’t going to produce the results we wanted, but I was so convinced it would work I instructed the team to keep going. And now we’ve lost weeks of labor. The idea in Design Thinking is to fail fast and fail often. So I fell into the trap of not recognizing when we were going down the wrong path early on, which means now we have to do some significant backtracking. (I really screwed that one up!)

In the coming weeks I’ll write about another problem with the fear of failure, and that’s how to manage up to make sure that the C-suite folks appreciate the advantage failure is. 

Let me know what you think and leave a comment!