Leave your comfort zone and embrace risk to thrive
Businesses must seize opportunities and learn from failure to stay relevant in a disruptive world
Mark Zuckerberg once said: “The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking any risks.”
We are living in an increasingly competitive, highly accelerated world in which disruptions happen every day and problems we’ve never contemplated or seen before emerge frequently.
Given these conditions, those who are willing to take risks, step out of their comfort zone and venture into the unknown despite the uncertainty will reap the biggest rewards.
We can never hope to achieve success unless we’re willing to embrace change and risk and, sometimes, the discomfort of failure. In fact, these days we must be willing to get comfortable with failure if we want to stay relevant.
Some failure is unavoidable when you take chances or risks. Not everything you try will work out, but that’s the only way you can ever accomplish anything.
Still, I know many leaders who perceive failure as a sign of weakness. Most hold to the mindset that they can never fail.
It’s unfair to burden our leaders with such expectations in an era when rapid changes in technology and communication mean that no one can possibly “know” everything to the point of never failing.
Rather, we must embrace the fact that if leaders never try anything new, never take any risks, then they can never make any breakthrough discoveries and their business will stagnate. Also, we need to encourage everyone to stop stigmatising failure.
The “comfort zone” concept is not new and dates back to an experiment in 1908 by psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson. Their findings suggested a relationship between a certain level of anxiety and performance of tasks, indicating a comfort zone we are constantly in.
The choice between getting out of a comfort zone and remaining in it can be the difference between a business rising as a disruptor or falling into the ranks of the disrupted. Let’s look at three reasons why.
First, the comfort zone does not necessarily mean the safe zone, especially in our rapidly changing world. Even a successful business that refuses to step out of its comfort zone ultimately gets disrupted. Without change, there’s no progress for yourself or your organisation, and for change to happen, you must venture outside the zone.
Second, staying in the comfort zone can lead to missed opportunities. This happens when you remain as you are without going beyond to try new things. Comfort usually leads to the dismissal of new opportunities, because organisations assume that the way they are is good enough, so why bother changing? It is only when you step out of that comfort zone that you’ll be able to see those opportunities and seize them.
Third, the comfort zone acts as a roadblock to organisational growth, as well as your own. Rarely will you see organisations growing while still within their comfort zones. Just like opportunities, growth is something that is out of reach when you’re boxed within your comfort zone.
Yerkes and Dodson explained that being in a state of comfort creates a stable level of performance. But that also means there’s no development or growth as your performance is constantly the same.
As a leader you need to do two things to help your organisation escape the comfort zone: become the role model for embracing failure and change the culture to celebrate failure. At the same time, you need to change the system to fail earlier, faster, and more cheaply.
Leaders need to show their people that it is more than okay to fail. Failure isn’t that bad, because after a few failures you start to become more resilient, then you get more comfortable with the idea, and increasingly willing to try something else. Fail again and you will learn to “fail forward”, not backward.
Also, it’s your responsibility to establish the new mindset of celebrating failure. Make it part of your organisational culture that everyone celebrates failures for the lessons they bring along the way to finding great solutions. In fact, you should be worried if you’re not failing, because that means you’re not being innovative enough.
I know that failure can bring discomfort to many people. It is difficult to be willing to step into the unknown and take risks, but sooner rather than later you will need to learn (and lead others in most cases) to embrace failure as part of the process of experimentation. It’s not easy, but it’s becoming more of a necessity and less an option in the current business climate.