Fail Thee Well

Although there is no shortage of maxims, axioms and old adages supporting the wisdom to be found in failure, few organizations succeed in mining a flop for the value it confers. Perhaps the single greatest obstacle to learning from failure is fear: Fear of admitting a mistake, fear of accepting that we’ve failed and fear that the acceptance will give incompetence a free pass.

It turns out that failing well is something that must be mastered. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, two senior fellows at the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and the Institute for Business Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of business offered four steps leaders can take to turn regrets into resources.

Admit that you have experienced failure yourself. Spending too much time creating a culture where failure is not an option is a mistake that leads to deception, deceit and potentially even greater failures. Acknowledging one’s own missteps, especially when it can be demonstrated how they lead to future successes, encourages others in the organization to be more forthcoming, earlier, about potential failures.

Making failure a talking point also reinforces that leadership understands the benefits of trial and error. Humility and humor are helpful in this initial step, the authors reminded.

When a failure occurs, ask the right questions. The knee-jerk reaction when something goes wrong is to ask who was responsible, which indicates that your priority is assigning blame rather than understanding why and how the mishap arose.  If an error occurs on your watch, instead of asking who was responsible, begin with questions that probe the what, where, how and why. Be ready to initiate step one.

Look to the laboratory for direction. Leaders often profess their commitment to innovation or any other “strategy du jour” so as to appear savvy, but assuming this image makes it harder to admit mistakes and change direction. Leaders would be better served by adopting the language and logic of experimentation, the authors asserted.

“After all, aren’t most new strategies, initiatives and projects a business version of experimentation—full of assumptions needing to be tested and either proved or disproved in the real world?” the authors conjectured. Scientists expect negative as well as positive outcomes from their experiments as they seek to move knowledge ahead.

It’s the end that counts. Leaders may not be able to prevent failure but they can control how the experience ends for their people. Behavioral economists understand that our future expectations are strongly influenced by how an emotionally charged event ends.

The authors note that the CEO of a global pharmaceutical company holds champagne lunches for those teams whose efforts do not yield the hoped-for results, holding that it is more important to praise his people for the nine times they fail than the one time they succeed.

Trust is the foundation of great workplaces, the authors suggest, and team members learn whether leadership is behind them during bad times, not good ones. “After all, failures aren’t usually the result of stupidity, laziness, carelessness or ill will; they’re a reflection of mistaken assumptions, misplaced resources, nimble competitors and even bad luck,” the authors wrote.

The authors conclude that failure—like people, money, facilities and technology—has intrinsic value. “Failure is reality’s way of showing you what you don’t know yet,” wrote the authors, co-authors of “The Other ‘F’ Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work.”  You may as well get the education that comes with the flop, they recommended, since you already paid the tuition.