90 Days to Level Up Your Teamwork

Week 11Failing to Succeed

Benchmark goal: Fail well: See how failure sets the stage for success.

Every child learns at some point that failure is bad, and dodging blame is a winning strategy. By the time we’re working adults, avoiding association with failure is all but second nature. This self-protective reflex may keep our reputation intact (or at least most people seem to think it does), but it harms the companies we work for. Why? It is nearly impossible to learn from failures if people don’t admit and analyze them. In any industry where innovation is crucial for survival, an ability to learn from failure is an essential skill.

Learning from failure thus begins with unlearning. This is because childish notions of success are intimately twined with self-esteem, status, and the need for approval. As adults we understand that knowledge is in constant flux, technology insists on changing fast, and confronting new and unfamiliar situations is simply part of working in the twenty-first century. Expecting failure-free performance is illogical in this dynamic context. Moreover, if we want to innovate, we must unlearn spontaneous responses about failure. We must reprogram. Unlearning the idea that failure is bad starts with a deeper understanding of failure.

Unpacking Failure

Over the last 20 years of research and consulting within organizations in a variety of industries, I’ve seen managers really struggle to embrace the reality that failure is an essential prerequisite to ...