There are few places in today’s business landscape where failure is celebrated, except perhaps Silicon Valley, where the “fail fast and fail often” motto has come to dominate corporate thinking over the last decade. Coined by author John Maxwell, the original quote is actually, “Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward.” Of course, this is an important distinction because simply failing for the purpose of failing is clearly a foolish strategy for businesses to adopt.

And yet, there’s something to be said for the idea of letting go of the negative perceptions around failure to develop failure tolerance as an organization because, as we all know, failure is inevitable!

Using Failure to Grow

As Dr. Manu Kapur explains when discussing learning from failure,

“Failure isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it can help in fostering your team’s long-term sustainable development. While avoiding failure may protect short-term performance, it hinders long-term growth and innovation. When employees take less risks and stay within their comfort zones, they miss opportunities to stretch their abilities and experiment with innovative solutions.” 

He goes on to explain the idea of something called “productive failure,” which he defines as intentionally embedding failure into tasks or activities with the express purpose of learning from them to engineer better solutions. And while this is a great idea, it is typically one that requires more staff and a bigger budget to accomplish, which puts it out of the reach of many small-to-mid market companies.

Instead, these smaller entities typically learn from inadvertent failures that occur during regular business operations due to unexpected roadblocks, forecasting or budgeting mistakes, market changes, economic uncertainty, and changing regulatory constraints. Withstanding these kinds of unintended failures and learning to adapt can help drive long-term growth.

Identifying Good Failure

Now, it’s important to keep in mind that organizations can experience “good failure” as well as “bad failure.” What’s the difference? In an interview on how to fail well, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson explains,

“A productive failure is one where we get new and useful knowledge, new knowledge that helps us go forward in creating the kind of value we’re trying to create in our market for our customers. So, we discovered something that we could not have discovered without trying it, without the experiment.”

We can say that “good failure” is a set of conditions that facilitates learning and growth. Learning from failure is the most important part of the process! This is why you will often hear a hiring manager ask a candidate the question, “Tell me about a time when you’ve failed and what you learned as a result” as often as you will, “Tell me about one of your biggest successes and how you achieved it.”

Failing Forward

Of course, failing forward does not just happen on its own. Failing forward requires:

• Understanding Your Goal

Learning from failure is predicated on understanding your goals from the beginning. Is the goal performance or is the goal learning? This is an important distinction because one of these will allow for failure, while the other will not.

For instance, in her interview Edmondson discusses the airline industry and explains that when flying an airplane, the goal is clearly performance – the plane is expected to arrive with all passengers on board alive. However, when testing a plane in a simulator, the goal is learning – do the technical specs hold up as expected and how far can the plane be pushed while still operating safely? Obviously, performance failures like a mid-flight engine problem can be studied after the plane is safely on the ground to offer valuable lessons for future flights, but companies that seek to use failure as a learning blueprint will need to engineer ways to fail safely so they don’t compromise critical performance.

• Addressing the Failure

When failure is unexpected, knowing how to address it is critical. An organization must determine if it can recover from an individual failure to make the overall activity a success, or if the whole thing needs to be scrapped. Often this cannot be planned for ahead of time. Instead, an organization will need to lean on its leadership to determine how to pivot to minimize immediate damage.

• Analyzing What Went Wrong

The nuance of the specific situation will need to be evaluated to determine the best course of action. For example, a failed product launch in a key market may still be able to be salvaged, or it may need to be written off as a loss and used to inform future business strategy.

Analyze what happened by asking questions that aim to understand how the failure occurred. Kapur suggests using reflective questions like:

• What assumptions did we make?
• Why did we believe this was the right solution?
• How could our approach have differed?
• Is there another solution that would have been better?

The purpose of conducting an analysis is to identify key takeaways that help the organization to learn from the experience and leverage it to drive future performance.

• Responding Well

Obviously, the end goal is to figure out how to respond immediately and how to do better next time. When handled correctly businesses can use failures to prepare well for the future and foster long-term growth.

Learning to fail successfully takes acceptance and a bit of patience. Giving your team and yourself permission to fail is key. With practice (although hopefully not too much) recovering from failure will lead to increased success.

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