Learning from Failure

From the minor slip up to a full-blown catastrophe, failure is a part of life and business. It’s part of your self-development, and it’s part of developing talent. It should be embraced as an opportunity for continuous learning and growth. If you encourage organizational learning, you can start developing employees. And then those who embrace failure are more likely to achieve their goals.

In the following sections, you’ll learn how to embrace failure by developing an attitude of learning from setbacks. You’ll learn about the cycle of success when developing people, and you’ll also explore failure in greater detail, its potential benefits, as well as key strategies for embracing it. In addition, you’ll unpack how adopting a learning attitude toward failure can benefit yourself and others.

Embracing the Success Cycle

Before successfully inventing the lightbulb, it’s said that Thomas Edison ran tens of thousands of experiments. When asked about the experience he denied having failed. Claiming instead, he’d just been systematically eliminating all the flaws.

Edison saw that failure isn’t the opposite of success, rather it’s a part of a process known as the success cycle, consisting of four stages, Trying, Failing, Learning, and Succeeding.

The success cycle starts when you attempt something new, by trying. This obviously involves the potential for error. When deciding on a new design, a car manufacturer may experiment with several shapes or elements before settling on a final, successful result. Only by considering a combination of inputs can the end product be envisioned. This brings us to the next stage in the success cycle. Failure. New ventures often end in disappointment. And that’s okay. Rather than panicking at the thought of making a mistake. We have to be willing to accept it. And the possibility to grow from it.

Give yourself permission to falter or slip up. Resist the urge to quit, or worse not to try at all. It’s natural to feel disheartened when things don’t go the way you planned. The key is to control your disappointment. And focus on moving forward, only wiser this time. By allowing yourself to experiment, to try and fail, you learn to accept unexpected and unwanted outcomes for what they are. A part of the process.

Next is the learning stage of the success cycle. Like Edison, you can decide to adopt an attitude of speculation and discovery. That means deciding to focus on the knowledge and insight you can gain from every experience, instead of fixating on the capacity for failure. Ask yourself, what happened, what went wrong, what did I miss? Then, once you’ve identified the problem, the cause of the failure, adapt your approach, and try again, growing from what you’ve learned. If you missed a step along the line, create a checklist to keep it from happening again. And, if you fail again, then learn and try again, this time more experienced.

And, eventually, you come to the final phase of the success cycle, which is to actually achieve success. This is the part where you celebrate. Enjoy your accomplishment. Let it last until the next thing you try. Then the cycle begins anew. But before you do, consider making yourself a perseverance list. The list should include what you did well. What went wrong. And what you learned. When you’re ready to try the next thing, review the list and remember that every failure presents a learning opportunity, and then go try something else.

Business expert, Tom Peters, promotes a simple philosophy, “whoever tries the most stuff wins. You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. And if not, then you do something else. The trick is doing something else.”

Embracing the success cycle helps you understand failure as a chance to grow and improve. Ultimately success is attainable. But only if you confront your fear and try.

Understanding the Three Types of Failure

The more you understand failure, the better equipped you are to learn from and move past it. Not all failure is bad. Think of it as existing along a continuum. With three major types. Knowing the differences between these three types of failure, helps you understand when you failed usefully and when you’ve simply messed up.

On one end of the failure spectrum lays avoidable failure. This failure is both unproductive and preventable, like basic human error. Disregarding process protocols can be costly and may result in doubled effort. Accidentally hitting reply all on a confidential email response, can be embarrassing and in extreme cases, cause your company’s reputation to take a hit. In either case, there’s nothing productive to be learned aside from don’t do it again.

The second type of failure is contextual, also known as complexity failure. It resides at the center of the failure spectrum. It’s a result of external influences beyond your control, such as changing regulations, or natural disaster. Consider, for instance, a complex series of repercussions for a producer of mobile phones. If the country responsible for supplying the rare mineral used to manufacture some of the electrical circuitry were to run out of natural resources. Entire consignments of smartphones would be delayed or canceled until an alternate source can be found. The resulting loss of revenue would be catastrophic.

Opening a new start-up company can be equally unpredictable, depending on the economy, a new business could thrive or lead to bankruptcy. In such cases, insolvency happens, not because the owners personally made poor business decisions, but due to the economic climate of the times. Having a contingency plan can reduce the effects of such failures. Contingency planning can save you time, money, and unnecessary stress, in the event of an emergency. Imagine what could go wrong and prepare for it to the extent possible.

The final type of failure is a natural consequence of undertaking striving efforts. At the opposite end of the continuum from avoidable failure, it’s at once both productive and unavoidable. It’s the inevitable result of pioneering endeavors. Pursuing challenging new ventures in an attempt to do what you’ve never done before. This is the failure you can learn and grow from. One particular form of striving can involve doing something familiar on a much larger scale, thereby stretching your capacity.

For example, expanding a small business could mean taking on larger projects. In the process, if the business owner misses a deadline because he was understaffed, or he miscalculated the development or production time. His failure is a necessary part of a learning curve that leads to reaching his ultimate goal. The key is to learn from it and apply what you’ve learned as you try again.

The secret to embracing failure is understanding which to avoid and what types to learn from, so you can move forward.

Cultivating a Learning Attitude

For most of us, the fear of failure is often more of a roadblock than failure itself. Instead of taking calculated risks in the pursuit of their goals, people give in to doubt and insecurity. Unwilling to try at all. But with the willingness to approach the potential of failure rationally, the calculated part of calculated risk can change one’s perspective on failure.

With the right attitude, mistakes become opportunities for growth and learning. And there are three key actions that foster an attitude of learning from failure. It starts with being willing to accept responsibility for your mistakes. Acknowledging that your own actions and decisions led to a failure is key to unlocking the benefits of failure. It’s that acceptance that allows you to learn from the ordeal. It goes deeper than simply owning up when you’re confronted on the matter. It’s the integrity to take responsibility.

Sometimes, even your best effort falls short. Own it. Once you do, you can dispassionately take the necessary steps to uncover the root cause of the mistake. What actually led to the error? As you explore the possible reasons, consider all the factors. Did you miss or misunderstand something? Was the process beyond your skillset? Was the failure caused by something beyond your control? Asking the right questions helps you pinpoint what went wrong, and then correct it.

Fear makes us want to give up. Rational questioning makes us want to try again. But be smarter about it. As much as the idea is to prevent any subsequent failures when cultivating a learning mindset, sometimes the best way to prevent future mistakes is to scrutinize those already made. Rather than shy away from failure, it can help to get curious about the immediacy of what’s gone wrong. The military has been using this approach for decades in what’s known as an after-action review, or AAR. AAR meetings take place immediately after a project milestone is reached or a portion of a task is completed.

Rather than assign blame, the focus is on gaining insight from the experience. Participation is vital in getting to the root of failure or success. Ask open-ended questions and encourage feedback. Compared to the actual outcome, what was originally expected? Were these expectations reasonable?

For example, a sales team may be required to sell 1,000 units per month, as part of a promotion. If during one month, they only manage 700 sales, an AAR helps uncover why. The key to a successful AAR is implementing the lessons learned so similar mistakes are evaded and best practices implemented. Every failure that comes from a well-considered and thought through plan brings you ever closer to success. In business, as in all of life, avoiding failure ultimately means delaying success.

People, like organizations, must take risks in order to grow and thrive, and risk means sometimes failing. But how you react to failure, the attitude with which you approach it is the difference between ultimate growth and stagnation. With a learning attitude, every mistake is an opportunity for development.

No business, or the people who comprise it, can avoid failure entirely. Organizations can only ensure the same mistakes aren’t repeated. And try again. Smarter.

Building Relationships through Failure

Learning from failure has personal and professional benefits. How you behave when faced with disappointments and setbacks, says a lot about your character. Your response to failure can even enhance your relationships. Learning how to fail with grace, influences how others see you, and how they approach working with you.

Embracing failure as a learning and growing opportunity reveals your humanity and humility. Achievement is exciting and talking about your achievements can be even more so. People congratulate you, marvel at how you did it, and ask for details, or share their own aspirations. But sharing your setbacks or failures feels more problematic, will you be scorned, ignored, pitied? Will you lose out on future work projects and promotions? But everyone fails from time to time, even your boss and coworkers. Owning your failures helps others realize that failure is universal, but how it’s dealt with can vary. Yes, failure shows others you are fallible.

But instead of hiding mistakes, you acknowledge and correct them. Failure does not have to be the elephant in the room, it can be examined and used to improve. Not only can you learn from it, so can others. Acknowledging failure demonstrates integrity. Accepting and owning your mistakes makes others more willing to work with you.

You aren’t going to blame them when something goes wrong. You’re not going to abdicate your responsibility, everyone fails. Not everyone responds to it admirably, and that builds trust. It makes you easier to relate to and work with. Being transparent about your mistakes shows you, to be honest, it encourages others to be more open and honest around you, and more willing to take risks and risk failure themselves.

Learning from your failures and sharing what you’ve learned makes you more approachable. Rather than avoiding you, people are often more willing to approach you as a resource. Your experiences impart a sense of authority and authenticity that others tend to respond positively to.

Humility, responsibility, integrity, trust, and approachability are leadership qualities, whether you hold a leadership position or not they are qualities that other people admire and gravitate toward. Acknowledging and learning from your mistakes makes you a better and more desirable manager, coworker, and person. Obviously, no one wants to fail or specifically seeks it out. Yet at some point or another, everyone experiences it anyway.

How you react to it, whether to shun and deny it, or embrace and learn from it affects your relationships at work and in the outside world. You can either enhance those relationships or put up buffers around them, the choice is yours.

Presenting Failure as Opportunity

For a business to succeed, it has to grow. Which means it has to try new things, new processes, new products, new ideas. And because it has to try, sometimes it’s going to fail. How it handles those inevitable failures goes a long way in determining how successful it will ultimately be.

Faced with failure, it’s tempting to shun it, deny it, assign blame, and quickly turn and walk away. Once in a while, in the short term, this might even work. But over the long haul, this behavior is counterproductive or worse. Faced with a prospect of shame, ridicule, or even the loss of their jobs, people become hesitant, suspicious, and unwilling to take the very type of strategic calculated risks necessary for innovation and growth. They and the company stagnate. While no business can tolerate or survive incessant failure, most misfires are the unexpected consequences of good intentions and thoughtful decisions that simply didn’t succeed. Those failures should not be treated as a cause for blame. But rather an opportunity for learning and the basis of trying again, only better prepared.

First, it’s in everyone’s best interest to be proactive. When mistakes or unexpected results arise, acknowledge and report it once it’s known and confirmed. Don’t wait for it to come up, or spread through gossip, or the informal grapevine. Own it and face it. If there is a simple fix or adjustment that allows you to get back on track with minimal fuss, then do it. But it still needs to be reported so it can be learned from moving forward.

If it’s not so simple, then it needs to be shared in order to help find solutions and avoid further complications down the line. Keep your account brief and to the point, but be accurate and stay honest. The point isn’t to deflect blame, but to find solutions to prevent a similar scenario from recurring. If you have a good idea on how to mitigate the situation, suggest it as a possible way forward, no matter how unconventional.

Take care to discuss what went wrong with all the key players and stakeholders, focus on the journalistic four Ws and an H, what, when, where, why and how. Fight the urge to defend yourself, even if you are at fault. Acknowledge, own, and get on with the process of learning from it. This allows you to end on a positive note, with confidence and optimism, because you’ve learned something. Maybe a few somethings.

To this end, you may want to prepare a list of lessons learned to the extent you can, before the AAR meeting. This is where you can begin to present the failure as an opportunity to learn from it, so you can move forward. They bring you and the organization closer to achieving the goals those misfires, unexpected consequences of good intentions and thoughtful decisions were intended to address in the first place.

NASA, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration, has an unofficial motto, failure is not an option. This is a laudable sentiment, especially in the light of the dangers of space flight and exploration. But it’s also a mirage. NASA has sometimes tragically experienced its share of failures. That’s because part of their mission is trying new things. The point, however, is that they learned from their failures, seeing them as opportunity to try again, only better.