Failure: An opportunity to begin again

“I’m having a really tough time teaching my people to embrace failure.”

What? Did I hear my client correctly? Does he really want his people to fail?

“So, if I understand you correctly, you want your people to fail,” I clarified.

“Absolutely. My mantra is ‘fail fast, fail often,’” he replied.

As we unpacked his philosophy, his brilliance began to dawn on me.

His business is about creating online games. He wants his people to create and test as many concepts as possible using a lean business model. Instead of finalizing a particular game by spending copious amounts of time getting it ‘just right’ before the customer sees it, the lean model promotes the development of an MVP Minimum Viable Product.

This MVP is tested with a relevant target audience. Their feedback will either validate the direction you’re going, or suggest you need to implement changes. If change is necessary you pivot and change your MVP to better suit the needs of the customer uncovered in the testing process.

The lean model is about testing your MVP and pivoting to refine your offering. Test-pivot. Test-pivot. Test-pivot.

At some point early on, either your concept is validated, or you kill it. You kill it early before you invest lots of money into it and then find out you had missed the mark.

So, my client wants to create a culture where failure is celebrated. Proving a concept doesn’t work before you spend a fortune developing it is a win. Now you’re smarter than before you failed. Start again — armed with what you learned through the ‘failure.’

Thomas Edison was a master at this kind of thinking:

“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

It’s been said that failure isn’t falling down, but refusing to get up.

Convincing people that failure is good is a challenge. We’re taught early on as children that failure is bad and must be avoided at all costs. You don’t want to fail a test or fail a grade. If you do, you’re not very ‘smart.’ We grow up afraid of failure.

According to a number of sources, the fear of failure is one of the top fears of the human race.

So, in light of that, how do you convince your team that failure is good?

Well, you can’t expect to do it very easily. I think the first thing you need to do is redefine failure and success. In my client’s situation he needs to define the early determination that a concept is not workable as a success. And subsequently, he must redefine what a failure is, like pouring far too much time and money into a concept before determining it’s not workable.

The new definitions of success and failure have to be repeated over and over and over again. And, ‘successful failures’ have to be celebrated.

Every person and every organization has a different appetite for failure. Some are very failure averse, others expect it. Innovation is tied directly to failure. The more innovation you want to see, the more failure you have to expect. You could say that failure is a prerequisite to innovation.

As Henry Ford said, “Failure is merely an opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

Winston Churchill declared, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” And added, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

So, what about you? Are you afraid of failure, or have you given yourself permission to fail? How could you redefine failure and then choose to reach beyond your grasp? How can you fail fast, fail often and ultimately, fail forward?

I give the final word to Michael Jordan, “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”

What do you need to try?