Finding Success through Rethinking Failure

In my professional life I spend a good bit of time involved with change teams. These teams have been driven and focused on technology, business and whole organisation change.

Change leaders focus on progress, alignment and return on investment. What can get overlooked is consciously pursuing failure and the value it can offer. Leaders in change report progress with a bias focusing too heavily on short term value indicators. In these environments failure is seen as a negative, wasteful activity that has impeded progress. On the whole, it usually has — that’s why I think we need to give failure a facelift. I may fail at doing this in this article — I hope that I’m at least a near miss.

Failure is a tricky subject in the corporate world. It tarnishes those associated with it and nobody wants to be branded an expert at failing. That said, in my experience, everyone fails — we just brand it differently or choose to plain ignore it. Working with executives in large businesses, I’ve come to realise failure is a taboo. We can sometimes rebrand past failures as ‘lessons learned’ and this in itself is a denial of failings.

I’m surprised by how many times I have seen project managers get the lessons learned log out before the start of a new project. Surprisingly few. I feel that ‘lessons learned’ is a patronising label for things that didn’t work as expected. Very few times I’ve seen it be used for genuine lessons. Learning is something that isn’t achieved by logging alone but through reflective and iterative experience. We learn the most when we fail. How do we maximise the value from failure in an environment where it is a taboo subject?

Different approaches have been pursued to crack this challenge. Some have rebranded failure entirely, moving from lessons learned through iterations to attempts. Others have chosen to encourage the mantra of ‘fail fast, fail small’. There’s even mantras of ‘fail well, fail often, fail forward’. The last one is my favourite and I am yet to see many corporations use this as a design principle.

Looking at the meaning of words we can see why failure is such a taboo subject. In a meritocratic environment that positively reinforces achievement and success, there is a natural suppression of the opposite. Most corporate environments need lots of failure to find the successes but these often go unreported as people want to be seen as productive.

Effective, productive and impactful all derive their meanings from a degree of success, progress or achievement. When it comes to reviewing corporate portfolios, alignment and value for money focus more on the hard measures (of success and progress) with little care for those things that weren’t effective.

Failure is often a complex beast. When we see organisations fail, commentators are quick to apportion blame to one or two things that were the crucial root cause. In reality, organisations are typically resilient and take a degree of failure in their stride. Look at the recent goings on with Carillion. There’s many different takes on why the organisation went through the turbulent and terminal times it did. There were probably many little incidents which could be classed as failures that lead to a catastrophic one. In this sense, failure works in an elastic rebound way (like bending a twig, you can bend it past it’s reasonable elasticity but eventually there is a snap). Because these smaller failings are all under the radar as nobody is talking about them, the larger ones often come as a surprise.

The same is true in mental health. Where organisations show some degree of resilience to a number of failings, there is less bandwidth for being resilient at the individual level. Our professional and personal lives can exact a toll on our mental state and there are certain labels which carry a heavier tariff. Failure, prone to failure, unlucky, are all negatively reinforcing labels which are dispensed at wholesale by us all. We tend not to think about the consequences of these labels. We also ignore the well intentioned limits which we put on others to prevent them from even trying because we worry about them failing.

I think it is time to reorient how we look a failure, both at a personal and corporate level.

Celebrating and encouraging failure without shifting the social stigmas around it seems like a fruitless endeavour. We need to look first at changes within ourselves. There’s many cliches out there about there being no failure, only lessons or experience. I feel that this puts a positive veneer over a human phenomenon that can be a powerful catalyst for change — if harnessed appropriately. Let’s look at changing the language to have more gradation than being absolute. Success or Failure is what we know — it doesn’t have to be.

I propose a change we could all try to see all our endeavours in the following light: like someone taking aim at a distant object with something that they’ve seldom practiced using:

• Outstanding Miss — They were fantastically wide of the mark, like aiming for the ground hoping to hit something in the sky.
• Wide of the Mark — Their shot was in the right ballpark but there is much scope for improvement regarding aim, power and other dimensions of hitting the mark.
• Miss — The shot fired is zeroing in on the target, still not hitting it but not that far off either
• Near Miss — The shot fired is very close to the mark, a few more iterations and the person taking aim may find the mark.
• Zeroing in — The shot has found the area around the mark, not in the ideal place but this is not a miss.
• On The Mark — this is when things have happened in a way that can only be described as ideal. Further attempts may be on the mark or near misses.

and

• Repeatedly On The Mark — this is when you can start feeling like you’re getting really good at something.

By using these gradations, failure is just another shot at a target. We focus more on the technique that led to the outcome rather than the fact that it was a miss or miles wide of the mark. At an individual level, it enables people to see a path to growth and a route to build self-esteem.

At a corporate level it enables different dimensions of how corporates work to be openly discussed 'e.g. Carol’s way of reporting supplier spending has been a Near Miss over the last few weeks. By giving her more support and authority she will find herself increasingly zeroing in’

By updating how we look at our endeavours to a more gradated way, there is greater richness in understanding what was done and how it could be done better. This can enable us all to focus on seeking out and finding the mark. To my corporate friends, I ask that we embody these principles in our portfolios. These techniques aren’t new- they’re hard-wired into our historic subconscious. A hunter-gatherer wouldn’t deliver and realise benefits — they’d either bring you a chopped up mammoth or tonnes of squirrel. If they couldn’t find either, you’d have lots of cabbage, berries and pumpkins. They didn’t do failure. Neither should you.