How a Festival of Failure Can Drive Success

Failure is going to be inevitable whether you're building a company, leading a political campaign, or fighting for change in your community. What sets the best leaders apart is how they respond to these challenges and setbacks. If we accept failure as a necessary part of the journey towards a goal, I believe we can leverage failure to our advantage. This set of skills is especially crucial for movement starters, who want to rally others behind them in support of an important cause. If you can't bounce back from failure, how can you expect your supporters to?

The following is an exclusive excerpt from my upcoming book PURPOSEFUL: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter? available on 5/22/18 from Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

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I’M A SUCKER for movies. And I mean really a sucker. I cry during nearly every movie I watch, including the animated ones, which is a running joke in my family. And I have a tendency to get so deeply pulled into the plot that my friends have seen me do ridiculous things like clap in the theater for a performance on film, or even wave good-bye to a character who is waving on-screen. I suppose it’s because I truly believe in the power of art to tell stories and for those stories to teach lessons that are valuable in life.

So it’s no surprise that I am especially inspired by those moments in movies and theater when someone is down and pulls themselves back up. I call it the Rocky Moment. You’ve lost one round, or two, or maybe every fight up until now, but you work harder, throw everything you have into it, get support and inspiration from others around you, and come back to win against the fiercest competitor. Or The Martian Moment, when you face a seemingly insurmountable challenge like bringing a stranded astronaut back from Mars before he dies, so you pull a talented team together, stumble through lots of failed ideas, and at the last possible minute, you come up with the one idea that just might work.

I believe these moments happen offscreen, too, in our daily lives. Some of them are just as dramatic as in the movies—from life-saving surgeries, to last-minute Hail Mary passes in professional sports, to feats of science that break new barriers, to campaigns that make massive global policy change. And some of these moments are smaller, like succeeding on a test we didn’t think we’d pass or getting funding for a project we thought no one would support. Big or small, we all have those Rocky Moments when we work hard and achieve something no one thought was possible, sometimes not even ourselves.

It’s not to say that there won’t be failures along the way. In fact, the very premise of a Rocky Moment is that failures must come before success. If it isn’t hard enough to warrant failures in the process of getting there, then it’s likely not a big enough challenge.

If it isn’t hard enough to warrant failures in the process of getting there, then it’s likely not a big enough challenge.

But as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “You mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.” We can look at these smaller failures in our lives not as final defeat but rather as part of the path to ultimate success, and we can learn from those failures along the way to make us stronger and increase our chances of achieving our ultimate goal. To quote Rocky Balboa himself, “It ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” If we see our lives as a series of Rocky Moments, we might just surprise ourselves with what we are able to accomplish. And the harder the fight, the sweeter the victory.

ONCE WE ACKNOWLEDGE that there will be many failures on our path, the question is what we do with them. And though it might be cliché (and is likely cliché for a reason), what we should be doing, of course, is learning from our failures. But is it possible to really go big when we learn from failure? I mean really kick the shit out of learning from failure? I believe it is. And the way to do that is to not just casually think, “Boy, that didn’t work,” but rather to dig in, understand and document exactly what didn’t work or why it didn’t work. And if you really want to take it to the next level, then the best way to do that is to share it. I don’t mean just mention it to someone else. I mean shout-it-from-the-rooftops share it, especially with people who are trying to solve the same problem as you. The more we know about each other’s failures, the less likely we are to repeat them, and the faster we’ll be able to move on toward finding solutions.

The more we know about each other’s failures, the less likely we are to repeat them, and the faster we’ll be able to move on toward finding solutions.

Thomas Edison is reported to have said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” And each of those 10,000 ways showed him something about what he might want to try or not try in the next experiment. He realized that he could get to solutions faster if he made mistakes faster and had more people working on the same problem. In fact, Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, was the first full-fledged research and development lab ever created. The speed of getting through failures to ultimate success led Edison to create 1,093 new U.S. patents—one for every two weeks of his working career. Edison and the team at his lab were the ultimate expression of the “fail fast” mentality that is now so common in Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs around the world.

At Change.org we de-stigmatized failure by instituting something called the “Festival of Failure,” a method to encourage people to share their failures in a way that others could learn from as well. It wasn’t formalized in one single way across the company. Instead, each team adapted the idea to its own workflow. Some global or functional teams had a Festival of Failure section in each weekly team call in which people chimed in with recent failure examples. The engineering team, whose members do demos with each other every week to show what they’ve been working on, would periodically have their own “Festival of Failure” demos to show examples of mistakes they made or code they broke and what they learned. The festivals highlight failure as a learning opportunity without shaming people for mistakes.

The festivals highlight failure as a learning opportunity without shaming people for mistakes.

They help us recognize that we all have failures, especially when we are trying to do ambitious things. There is no shame in that. The only shame is in not sharing the failures we make so others can learn from and avoid them.

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Excerpted from Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter? by Jennifer Dulski, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright ? Jennifer Dulski, 2018.