Three Ways to Shift Our Failure Mindset

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Thomas Edison is famous for having tried 10,000 different filaments before discovering the one that made his light bulb work. “I have not failed,” he said. “I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Must be nice to have that mindset surrounding failure, right?

Meanwhile, most of us avoid failing at all costs. It feels awful to mess up and make mistakes, especially when we are accountable to others on our team or our organization. Failure, for many, is not an option.

In last week’s livestream, I explained that we never take risks if we try to avoid failure. We don’t develop scar tissue, a type of learned wisdom that comes from experiencing disappointments and building the resilience necessary to handle whatever future setbacks come our way.?

In the era of Artificial Intelligence, fear of failure is dangerous. Technology is moving quickly, and we must hustle to keep up. Things are going to go wrong. Constantly. To be disruptive leaders, the only way to survive is to have a healthy relationship with failure.?

Three Ways to Shift Our Failure Mindset

As with Edison, we need to shift our mindset about failure. To curb this fear and be better positioned to handle failures, we must learn to temper some of our hallmark emotional responses, prepare ourselves for missteps, and develop a support system to lift us up when we fall down.?

1. Remove shame from failure.

Did you know that 99 percent of the decisions we make are reversible? Yet, we act as if each one of those decisions is permanent, locked, and irreparable. We think this because of the emotions we tie to being wrong. “What if we failed in that decision? Then it would make us look bad. We can’t let anyone know.” What inevitably happens is we hide our work, we move slowly and cautiously, we go into analysis paralysis, and we make bad decisions—all because we’re afraid of the shame we’ll endure if we fail.?

The more we make failure a part of everyday life, the more we can address and remove those terrible feelings of shame, disappointment, and regret that so often come with it.?

2. Practice humility.

It’s undoubtedly essential to prepare for unexpected events and worst-case scenarios. But it’s equally important to acknowledge that you can’t possibly anticipate everything that can happen. There’s always something out the backdoor on the horizon you didn’t see coming—or something you just can’t control. That requires a massive dose of humility to know that you simply don’t have all the answers. And that you never will.?

When you can accept that, failure feels less daunting of a scenario because you know you’ve taken your best bet with all the knowledge that you’ve had. You made the best decision possible. You can accept the outcomes whether it works out or not.?

3. Seek a robust support system.

You can do all of the emotional work and preparation, and you can have the right mindset, and in the end, if something doesn't work out, it can still feel just plain awful. That's just the reality.?

It can feel impossible to separate the project from the personal, so it’s crucial to foster a strong support network. The more we can come together over shared experiences as teams and organizations, the more we can learn from failures, or, rather, “non-successes.” Being collectively open and vulnerable is the best way to gain the knowledge—and eventually, wisdom—needed to make different decisions or better judgments in the future.??

The Case For Never Failing

One of my favorite stories about reshaping one’s failure mindset comes from a CEO who decided that his company would “never fail again.”?

At first, he and his organization decided to embrace failure. Their adopted motto was “fail fast and fail smart,” with the idea that failure was the road to success. Failure was a good thing, right? Well, all that lip service didn’t lessen the bite that came from a failure. It still felt awful. This philosophy wasn’t working for them, so they flipped the script. His company decided never to fail again.

Trust me: I was skeptical, too. I wrote an entire chapter in my book, Open Leadership, about the “failure imperative.” You can’t just opt out of failing, can you?

Well, they did, and it worked. Of course, this doesn’t mean they had a zero-tolerance policy for mistakes. It was the exact opposite.

The company erased the word—and the mindset—from its vocabulary and its corporate culture. Whenever this CEO sensed that someone was feeling like they were failing, he’d correct them: “Why are you feeling this way? I understand why you may feel this way, but what you came up with is fantastic—look at everything we learned. Let’s not feel bad about all the things we’ve learned.”?

In those encounters, the employee’s feelings of failure are not ignored or dismissed—they’re acknowledged. And yet they’re actively being trained to reframe their thinking, to look at it from a new perspective.?

What I loved most about this CEO’s story was how it led to such a strong culture of psychological safety surrounding failure: at this company, you could miss the mark and be accepted. You could take risks. You could focus on the process, not just the outcome. You could pivot and make a new decision. You could decide something isn’t working and immediately start looking for a new way. You could simply never fail again.

Next week, we’ll continue exploring these concepts of failure and wisdom, and I’ll pose the question: “Can AI be wise?” Join me on Tuesday, June 13 at 9 am PT to learn more.

Your Turn

Could you adopt the philosophy in which you never failed again? How do you learn from mistakes? What is your process for incorporating that into your habits as a leader?