It’s a common tenet in both personal development and business circles that failure is actually a good thing. Attempting something and failing at it provides a tremendous learning opportunity. On the personal development side, developing a new skill or habit will, by necessity, be full of failure. If we are good enough at something that we never fail then we will also never improve. On the business side, failure is used as a means of checking one’s assumptions for correctness. For example, we have a product we think is fantastic, we have a target market and we have identified likely channels for reaching our target market. So, we fire up an advertising campaign using our channels to our market and things don’t go as expected. It seems maybe our product is not as good as we thought or our target market doesn’t really want it. But in the process, we inadvertently hit a different demographic and “bang!”, they love our product! From the narrow perspective of the advertising campaign, we have failed. But in the bigger picture, we’ve learned something much more valuable. We now know that we misjudged who would really be interested in our product but that’s okay because we found our real target market.
Failing Fast
So, if we accept that failure is a good thing then, by extension, failing fast is even better. After all, if we’re going to benefit from our failure, it makes sense that we want that to happen as soon as possible. Now here’s where things tend to differ between personal development and business. More often than not, personal growth only occurs after much failure. Generally speaking, we will fail many, many times when developing new skills or habits. The key here is to recognize incremental improvements and hold on to those. View them as stepping stones to the endpoint we are striving for and realize that continually failing while taking the same actions is really what we’re after. On the business side however, continually failing by taking the same actions is a big no-no. Incremental corrections can be quite costly over the course of a large change. Continuing with the product example, suppose we hadn’t identified an alternate target market. Would it make sense to try another advertising campaign with only minor changes? Unless we received some sort of validation that our assumptions were at least partially correct, it would be pure folly to try again with only minor changes. In this case, a large-scale change is required; a complete change of direction. The key here is to make the cost of failing as low as possible: fail fast and fail cheaply.
The Price of Failure
Now here’s where things get tricky. It’s easy to talk about the benefits of failure but there’s a price to pay for failure even when we know it’s a good thing. On one hand we have the fear of failure. Even though it’s possible to convince oneself on an intellectual level that failure is necessary, fear is not an intellectual construct but an emotion; and as we all know, emotions don’t always pay heed to sound reasoning. To further complicate things, when we do fail, we get hit with the other hand of emotional confirmation. It hurts to fail. Anyone who says otherwise likely hasn’t experienced a real failure. Again with our product example, the fact that our target market didn’t like our product leaves us wondering where we went wrong. We wonder why the people we talked to claimed to like our product and why they aren’t respresentative of the larger demographic involved. We wonder if they were just telling us what we wanted to hear instead of being truthful. Furthermore, we internalize the failure and extend it to ourself. We begin to suspect that maybe we’re the problem and quickly forget that it wasn’t “us” we were selling but merely a product.
One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again. ~ Henry Ford
Perception Matters
This brings us to the wildcard in failure. People and their perception. As nice as it would be to have all our failures evaluated on a solely objective basis, that just doesn’t happen. People will judge us and our actions from their personal perspective. On the personal development side, people will typically associate us with our failure. They will not see the failure, but instead see us as a failure. Naturally, this is bruising to the ego and can be difficult to handle. This is where holding on to incremental improvements becomes important. Having something, no matter how small, to point to can go a long way in helping us cope. On the business side, things are a little different. The failure perspective tends to manifest itself as a lack of confidence in our ability to deliver and, given a business environment that does not implicitly understand the importance of failure, this can lead to general confidence issues both from others and for ourselves.
The Originating Story
What started me thinking about failure and it’s effects was a situation that occurred recently at work. I was tasked with developing a fairly straightforward solution for gathering data. While putting it together I discovered that one particular piece of functionality requested was actually rather difficult to implement properly. I spent a reasonable amount of time trying to make it work with no luck. Although there was a potential solution, it involved cutting some corners and I felt that was not a good idea. So, I informed the project manager that this just wasn’t going to happen. This admission of failure caused a bit of panic all around and a meeting was scheduled to deal with the consequences. In the meantime, a bit of brainstorming with a coworker revealed an alternate solution that I had not initially considered. I had been blinded by looking for variations on the initial solution rather than examining the core problem. After a little bit of thinking and experimenting we determined that we could put together a solution that should reasonably meet the requirements. At the meeting to deal with the failure, I presented the new solution and even though it seemed to meet the requirements, I could see that the clients were skeptical since I had previously declared “failure”. In the end, the solution was examined objectively and the clients accepted it with only minor changes.
Taking the Bad with the Good
Failure can be a very positive thing in all aspects of our life as long as we remember to consider and deal with the subjective consequences. Keeping the following in mind will help when dealing with failure:
- Failing is good
- Failing fast is better
- Failing is going to hurt
- Failing will change peoples’ perception of us
- Failing is necessary for success
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail. ~ Confucius
- Dave
One of the books I’m currently reading is 
