By understanding what failure is and how to use it as fuel rather than shame, we can take proactive steps to hone this skill over time.
Failure is often conflated with carelessness, and we are (rightfully!) afraid of seeming careless. But failure—true failure—is something we achieve with intention. By understanding what failure is and how to use it as fuel rather than shame, we can take proactive steps to hone this skill over time.
Modern Mentor is hosted by Rachel Cooke. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
Find Modern Mentor on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, or subscribe to the newsletter to get more tips to fuel your professional success.
Modern Mentor is a part of Quick and Dirty Tips.
Links:
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/
https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/modern-mentor-newsletter
https://www.facebook.com/QDTModernMentor
https://twitter.com/QDTModernMentor
https://www.linkedin.com/company/modern-mentor-podcast/
https://www.leadabovenoise.com/
Hey, it’s Rachel Cooke, your Modern Mentor. And today’s episode is about mastering failure. We talk so much about learning from failure. And we’re all terrified of it. So how do we shift our mindset and our comfort? Well, listen up.
Fun fact about me. My gym is my happy place, my Disneyworld. I love being there, and I think it’s a huge part of what keeps me successful in juggling the many balls I have in the air. Also, vanity is real. And bathing suit season is a-coming.
One of the things I love about working out is that at the gym, failure is literally a thing we strive for. It’s the word we use when we couldn’t possibly eke out one more rep. Failure—in exercise—is accomplishment. It means you left it all on the floor and now it’s time to celebrate.
But at work, failure is still kind of the F-word. We say we want to learn from it, to use it to teach us how to move forward. But mostly, we hide from it. Or we avoid it by making super safe choices which keep us from failing… but also from creating or experimenting. It keeps us vanilla. And we need some chocolate sauce on there.
So if you’re an innovator at heart (or even just a wannabe innovator) and you want to create more space for testing and learning and yes—failing—at work, how can you do this without putting your job on the line?
When someone drops the ball, misses the deadline, sends out the unproofed campaign, we call that failure. But that’s not failure—that’s straight-up carelessness. These are undesirable outcomes due to bad action or inaction.
“Failure,” on the other hand, is an undesirable outcome resulting from a good action—a risk, an experiment, an alternative approach—but done with intention and planning.
If your last ad campaign performed poorly because you didn’t do the research to understand your target market, that’s carelessness. But if it performed poorly because you were intentionally testing a new market to learn what they respond best to, then it’s a failure. It was done with intent and it has intelligence to offer.
See the difference?
The more we start to claim a better definition of “failure” and decouple it from carelessness, the more space we’ll get to play with it.
Now that we’re clear on what failure is, the next thing we need to do is harness its intelligence.
There’s a classic episode of Friends where Rachel decides to make a trifle. Through a mishap with the cookbook and two pages getting stuck together, she ends up concocting a combo of sweets and meats. The only insight the Friends take away that night is to never again eat Rachel’s cooking. It was comedic carelessness.
But take that same scenario and imagine Rachel wanted to experiment—with intention. She truly wanted to learn how people responded to a meats-and-sweets fest. She’d have made the recipe, watched their reactions, and asked some follow-up questions (assuming they’d still be willing to speak to her).
Like…
What specifically didn’t you like about it?
What if I’d dialed up the sweetness or down the savoriness?
What if I’d added cheese or peppermint or bubblegum?
In this second scenario the outcome is equally rancid. But made with intention to learn, the experimenter has an opportunity to find some insight so next time she knows to add the peppermint and skip the beef.
So what’s a “what if” you’ve been curious about at work, but afraid to try? With a new definition of failure, can you ready yourself to run an experiment, knowing you’ll find some insight at the end to help tweak your direction next time?
Learning from failure is about using the insight you gain to be more intelligent the next time.
Maybe you sent out a bold marketing campaign or tested a super-modern store display. And customers kind of didn’t love it. That’s OK. Because you’ve observed their behavior or you got some feedback or you tracked certain metrics which told you what specifically didn’t work, and what might be worth trying next time.
So now, you try again, standing on the shoulders of what you’ve already learned.
Your next version of that campaign uses smarter color choices or a clearer call to action. Or your next store display leaves more space between items, or puts the right shirts or shoes closer together so customers see how well they pair.
Once you learn something, try again. Make a change. And see how the outcomes begin to shift.
If we’re gonna reclaim failure then we need to change the conversation around it. By which I mean we need to actually have the conversation around it.
How can you tell if someone’s achieved failure at the gym? Oh don’t worry—they’ll tell you! I’m proud when I can’t squeeze that last rep out! It means I did something new, something hard.
This is where we need to get to at work. When you send the bold campaign or try that uber-modern looking store display and it fails but you learned something… you’ve GOT to talk about it. Let people see you tried, you flopped, you learned, and you did something different as a result.
If you can make that trend catch on, imagine how much more creativity you’d get to see happen at work.
Wouldn’t we all prefer to work in a more creative and inventive place where testing and learning is not only safe but celebrated?