No one likes to fail. Fail is a four letter work. Failing makes us look bad, and most of us will do alsmost anything to avoid looking bad. Yet, without failure, we would probably enjoy few successes.
No one is a stranger to failure. We failed repeatedly before we learned how to sit, stand, walk, or ride a bike. If you drive a car with a manual shift, you probably failed many times before you learned how to coordinate successfully the pressing of the clutch and gas pedal to produce a smooth shift. Failure is a natural, and in most cases, inevitable result of trying something new, something we have not yet learned how to do. In other cases, failure is the result of trying something that we are already good at, but which didn’t work at the time. For example, Michael Jordan, one of the most accomplished basketball players of all time, is quoted as saying “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Thomas Edison once said “I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” There are two things of interest in what Edison said. The first is that when he said “I haven’t failed”, he was speaking in terms of his overall goal, which was to find a filament for the light bulb. Clearly each of the 10,000 attempts he made failed to produce the needed filament. Failure, then is relative to the objective, goal, or purpose you are striving to achieve. No objective, goal, or purpose, no failure.
The second is that Edison used failure as feedback. Each time we fail, we have the opportunity to invalidate ourselves by saying something like “I am so stupid,” or “I will never learn this”, or any number of other things that make us feel incompetent, inadequate, or insufficient. Edison didn’t do that (at least in this quote). He used the failure as feedback on what didn’t work – an d learned from it. The value of failure is that it tells you that what doesn’t work. It doesn’t tell you why something doesn’t work, only that it doesn’t. Failure, then, is valuable feedback if you are willing to listen to and learn from it. And therein lies the opportunity.
Odds are, not everything you do will work. Few of us achieve every objective, reach every goal, or accomplish all of our purposes. Failure is inevitable, even for star performers like Jordan and Edison. The issue is not whether you will fail, but what will you do when you do? One thing you can do is to blame others (e.g., coworkers, customers, managers, etc.) or blame conditions and circumstances (e.g., order process, reward system, information systems). Doing this, however, results in learning nothing new. By blaming conditions and circumstances, including other people, we pass up the opportunity to learn new ways to interact with others or to try new techniques which may be more effective. In a very real sense, we condemn ourselves to repeat what didn’t work.
Alternatively, we could use the failure as an opportunity to discover what it was about what we did (or didn’t do) that could have contributed to the failure. Was it something I said or failed to say? Did I prepare myself and others completely? Although considered the best player of his time, Michael Jordan was said to have practiced more than any of his teammates. This included practicing the kinds of shots he might be called on to make to win the game. He used his failures as an indication of what he needed to work on, what he needed to practice. Failures weren’t an invalidation for Michael, they were important to future successes because he was willing to use them as feedback and develop his own abilities rather than blame others.
Management is simple, but it isn’t easy. But, we can make it easier if we are willing to use failures as feedback for developing ourselves rather than as opportunities for blaming others.
