Celebrating Failures

What is the real "f" word? It's failure. We all want things to go perfectly - or what we perceive as perfectly. But the truth is, they don't, always. Trying new things creates the possibility of failure. In a business landscape where the message is predominantly that "Failure is Bad," it's no wonder that failure is perceived as a dirty word.

Now seriously, every manager, business owner, executive and employee has made mistakes and experienced what they consider failures. As human beings, it's almost second nature to us to follow the path of lease resistance by beating ourselves up over every perceived failure and then to continually remind ourselves how often, and how badly, we've screwed up.

There is another way. What would it look like if rather than seeing any task or action that didn't turn out as originally planned as a "failure", we saw each of them as learning opportunities...? What might we create? What opportunities might arise for us? What would change if we were able to step away from self-blame and emotional flagellation and move forward into celebration? Years ago, when Bill McGowan was still alive and running MCI, there was a sign in the lobby that said, "Make Some Damn Mistakes." The philosophy underneath that sign was that if you didn't make mistakes you were not taking risks. Bill truly believed that risk- taking was the greatest opportunity for learning, and that nothing new, creative, innovative or exciting happened without taking risks. It's simply too bad that the culture has changed since MCI was sold to WorldCom.

Part of the problem with the entire concept of failure is that it allows leaders of companies to actually see things as successes or failures, instead of as learning experiences. Every single move a company makes, or action that it takes, is an opportunity for learning - whether it works or not. Even things that work out perfectly the first time may not work the next time. Without understanding what made the action or move work, what conditions or environment or alignment of the stars made it come together, there is no true success.

After all, you won't be able to duplicate the perfect action if you don't understand what conditions allowed it to work out perfectly in the first place. And will those conditions be the same the next time? If something didn't work, was it a failure? Of course not. If an action didn't work, it simply means that something interfered with that action working as well as planned. Any number of things - from timing, to economy, to client needs, to the vehicle used for distribution - any number of random factors may have interfered with the action working as planned. But if you automatically consider that action a failure, you lose the important opportunity of learning how to make it work better the next time.

When something you've planned for your company doesn't work as well as expected, it's not necessarily comfortable, but it's usually illuminating. When you look at everything from the perspective of "what can we learn from this?", then you put yourself in a place where you can make better decisions about the future and you also encourage your people to work from a position of innovative re-thinking. They will be empowered to constantly improve actions and strategies. How can you lose with that?

What if we celebrated failure instead of hiding our "mistakes" in some allegorical closet?

History has shown over and over that not daring to fail, or conversely refusing to admit failure and the lessons intrinsic to it, has often created devastating consequences of grand proportions. It's no small matter how we look at the idea of failure and our response to it.

Let us not forget that our greatest successes, in business, science, literature and indeed, life, have started from failure. That's how we learn. Success isn't nearly so powerful.

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas Alva Edison