How to Work with the F Word - Failure - Instead of Freezing
If you’ve had that moment where you’re struggling to get started, perfectionism is getting in the way, or you’re too scared to mess up? This one is for you.
Rather than focusing on avoiding the thing because we want to do it perfectly - we need to focus on how to set ourselves up to fail and make mistakes - so that we can LEARN from them.
The thing we all get wrong about Failing (capital F), is that we try to hide it away in shame. To avoid thinking about it. To place blame outward versus inward. And, if we do take a moment to consider it, we usually try to gloss over and run away as quickly as possible. Especially in a world where our social feeds are people telling success stories or hiding the mess behind their overnight success.
So we’re going to bring in Amy Edmondson and her book Right Kind of Wrong. Ever heard of psychological safety? Well, here’s the BIRTHPLACE.
What we’ll pull out from the book with a lot of commentary from me!
1 - Why Failure has 4-letter Word Energy
2 - The Three Types of Failure
3 - Elements of the “Best” Type of Failure
4 - Some Ideas to Encourage “Good” Failure
5 - How to Get GREAT at FAILING
Let’s GO.
1 - Why Failure has 4-letter Word Energy
This one feels obvious but we’re going to talk about it anyway. We don’t like to fail. We’re terrified of it. Failure carries with it experiences of shame, guilt, regret, all the energy of making a shameful error. How many times have you found yourself in a moment of failure with your cheeks pink or the heat rising in the back of your neck with a side of nausea?
On one hand, every success story has a little taste of failure. It’s actually outlined in any story crafting technique. There has to be a moment that the hero thinks all is lost and they’ve failed. And then! They overcome! They’ve suceeded!
The stories rarely paint the realistic image that people are failing all the time, and are scared to highlight it. In a world of perfect social media presences - there’s so much behind the scenes.
Knowing that failure pulls upon our discomfort - we throw our hands up and say what to do?!
In truth, failure is part of life! As Edmondson states, “Every kind of failure brings opportunities for learning and improvement.”
We’re all going to fail.
Over and over.
So how can we focus on failing well. Failing forward. Failing towards the future state of the success story!
Well that has to do with types of failure and how we think about it. It’s important to note that we struggle with failing well because of Aversion (the emotional response), Confusion (we don’t understand what went wrong), and Fear (the social stigma around failure).
It’s human nature to have negativity bias - to focus on the bad, rather than the good. In the Olympics they found that third place medalists we’re happier than silvers. Why? Because the bronze medalists we’re just so happy to have medaled, whereas the silvers were beating themselves up for “failing” to hit first place.
Our go-to move with failure is to hide it away. To avoid it. To blame others. That’s not where growth comes from friends.
We simply don’t like to fail. And we clump all failures together. However, there are really three types of failures, with differing levels of pain associated. Let’s learn about them.
2 - The Three Types of Failure
Edmondson outlines three types of failure: Simple, Complex, and Intelligent.
Simple Failures ( = Oopsies) - the failures where we made a smaller error even when we know how to do it right normally. Like we were in autopilot and took the wrong turn because we weren’t paying attention. Or we tripped over a step since we were texting on our phone. We know exactly what to do: pay attention to the road and turn when needed / don’t text and walk on the stairs without looking around. But we still made the mistake. This could be the same as sending the email and cc’ing instead of bcc’ing - a simple faulty error that we know how to do correctly when we’re in the zone.
Complex Failures ( = This is a mess!) - the failures that are brought upon by a series of factors that all compounded and suddenly something familiar feels unfamiliar and errors occur. Kind of like when you’re heading to an important meeting, but between road traffic, diversions, your car ran out of gas since you forgot to fill it up, there wasn’t any parking because they’re ripping up the sidewalk, the elevator is out of service, etc. Technically, you failed to get to the interview on time, but in reality a whole host of things came together even when you had the best intentions.
Intelligent Failures ( = Oh wow!) the failures that we’re carefully considered or designed to learn from, or, some kind of new thing occurs in an unexpected way that helps us further something. We’ve heard the stories about penicillin being an accident, or post-its being a surprise. This could look like running A/B tests to decide which product is the right fit for a specific market rather than simply diving in blind.
What do you do for each of these failures to turn them into learnings? Great question!
Simple Failures -> often result in having to remind ourselves to stay present, pay attention and don’t go on autopilot
Complex Failures -> noting when things are getting messy and continuing to pivot and shift to adapt to the new circumstances - or speaking up when you see things going off the rails
Intelligent Failures -> persevere and reflect on the learnings to keep driving forward
Okay, we get it. Simple and Complex failures aren’t that interesting. How do we get to lean towards more Intelligent Failures so that we get to jump into our own success story!?
3 - Elements of the “Best” Type of Failure
So let’s say we want more intelligent failures. What makes for an intelligent failure? There are a couple key factors that help ensure you can glean learnings from it:
You believe that it’s a nice a risk for your mission
You’re going to learn from it either way
Cost/scope isn’t massive so it won’t feel painful
You know what you’re trying to learn - clearly
You’ve created a plan to test the things you want to learn
You’ll try to reduce other frictions
So here’s an example of good intelligent failure. Let’s say you want to attempt a new marketing strategy to get more people to buy widgets. We want more widgets! So first, we know this new marketing strategy will be important to widget purchases - our lifelong mission! We decide to put together a strategy for emails to go out, and we say to ourselves - this will help us find out if it moves the needle on widget sales! We spend very little - it’s email after all! We clearly develop three different emails, or a flow of some sort, and then we go and send them out to a small population and we gather that results. Ah! Maybe some of the emails do great - people open them! And some do even better - they open and click! And some make it all the way to purchasing. At the same time, the emails could flop - but we will have learned that the email marketing strategy didn’t’ work.
Basically - it’s really easy to make an intelligent failure into a learning because we planned for it. It wasn’t a surprise - we knew we wanted to try it!
4 - Some Ideas to Encourage “Good” Failure
Okay yes yes we want to get better at failure! We understand that there are different types. So how can we encourage “good” failure?
Psychological Safety.
That’s it. That’s this entire section.
What is it? “An environment where you don’t fear rejection for being wrong - is the antidote to the interpersonal fear that prevents uf from failing well.”
The main deterrent from intelligent failure is that we often don’t feel safe to speak up and share mistakes. Instead, we avoid bringing them up, we hide away, we shift blame.
If we can create psychological safety on our teams - and within ourselves - we’re creating an environment that reminds us that learning is growing - we’re getting better by continuing to test, iterate, explore and try - and owning our mistakes is wildly brave and incredibly helpful to the cause.
5 - How to Get GREAT at FAILING
Want to get better at failing? Of course you do! Here are some things you can try out:
Build your growth mindset - We’re super fearful of change and failure - and the idea that we can do things differently with new results - it breaks our brain! So we need to develop, nurture and support our brain to shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset to take on challenges
Work against regret - Daniel Pink outlines that one of the key areas of regret is when we skip taking on those BOLD actions because of fear of failure, shame or ridicule. Don’t let a bold action skipped today be a future regret. Do the damn thing instead of regretting it later
Battle our inner perfectionist - We expect perfection in everything, on our first try. That’s insane, but true! We’re so hopeful that the reality will match our precious imagination that we end up doing nothing at all. Expect imperfection, relish it, and enjoy screwing up
Recognize the stakes - How big are the stakes? A really big presentation to senior stakeholders? A pitch to raise funding with a big deal investor? Maybe we shouldn’t dick around. But what if we’re testing our pitch to a friend or old mentor? Recognizing the stakes can help us make mistakes, thoughtfully. Let’s run an experiment!
Remove blame - easier said than done, but we’ve all worked places where the post-failure meetings aren’t about learning, but about finding the culprit. Release yourself (and your team) from blame, and instead encourage speaking up, catching things early and encouraging the idea to experiment according to the stakes at hand - that’s who we learn, after all!
Play with fear - we’re terrified of failing. So pretend you already failed. That wasn’t so bad was it? You lifted yourself off the floor, right? Future you could handle it. Instead of avoiding the fear of failure - assume you will fail. You’re human!
Find safe spaces - the best moments are with people you trust to talk openly about your mistakes so that you can actually process the emotional charge of them, and then move forward. If you don’t have people you trust to be vulnerable yet, start building that. It makes all the difference - whether that’s colleagues, mentors, business groups, therapists or coaches.
Stop/Challenge/Choose - when you’re freaking out STOP - take note of what is happening, CHALLENGE - the assumptions that you might be making, and then CHOOSE - how you want to act instead. I.e. maybe you’re getting overly emotional that your meal is falling apart. Everything is bubbling over, the umami tastes are subpar. Instead of throwing in the towel, we can pause ourselves and say whoa whoa this is fine, we don’t have to pass out from the terrible nature of this meal. Let’s throw some cheese on it. And we’ll keep working on our cooking skills
Get gritty - one of the easiest ways to get better at messing up, is finding a space that makes it easier to make mistakes. For almost everyone I work with who’s about to do some kind of pivot or exploration - it’s really nice to take on something tricky and complicated that’s low risk. That could be taking a pottery class, learning a new language, a workout routine - any activity that pushes you to make mistakes that isn’t going to hurt anyone - or at least, only a light bruising of pride.
Make it small - if failing still feels hard… make it little. No, even littler. This doesn’t mean I’m saying play small all the time. It means that if failing feels TERRIFYING, we can toy with pushing against those emotions by making the stakes lower, smaller, and more palatable for our brains.
What do you do to help yourself fail? Good luck failing friends.