How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate Failure a Little Less

Written by Elyse Ball​
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Startup cultures are obsessed with failure. We constantly hear the mantra “fail fast” and see entrepreneurs throw literal failure parties for unsuccessful companies and products. I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider to this ethos. I understand that all of us will fail sometimes and that trying something new or interesting increases our risk of failure. We can learn a lot from failing. However, I still sometimes behave in unnecessarily risk averse ways and shut down when a failure occurs, which limits my ability to learn from it.
 
When a fellow I-Corps instructor told me that there was a science to failing the right way, I was immediately intrigued. Diving into Amy C. Edmondson’s The Right Kind of Wrong, Adam Grant’s Think Again, and the Freakonomics podcast series on failure has given me some much needed perspective on failure. This includes a method for classifying types of failure and actionable steps we can take to make the most of the right kinds of failure.
 
First, not all failures are created equal. Research Amy C. Edmondson has spent decade cataloguing failure and puts failures into three major buckets that help us understand how to react to it:
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• Basic failure results from errors or mistakes that could have been avoided through better planning, communication, or execution. Think about oversleeping because you set your alarm to p.m. instead of a.m. or forgetting to send an important email.
• Complex failure results from unforeseen interactions between different components or factors within a system. An example is vacation plans that get derailed because of bad weather, a flight cancellation and a sick kid.

• Intelligent failure occurs within the context of well-designed experiments aimed at innovation and improvement. Think about pharmaceutical trials or beta tests.

 
While we want to try to minimize the first two kinds of failure, intelligent failure is the kind of failure entrepreneurs and innovators should be striving for. In intelligent failure, the risks taken are intentional and create a valuable learning opportunity that can advance a field or industry. These are the failures we really should throw parties for! 
 
Like any art, failure is something we can get better at. In fact, we can engineer our organizations to learn the most from intelligent failure:

• Recognize that failure is inevitable: We all make mistakes. Classifying the cause of the failure creates some objectivity that opens the door to learning. So does taking a few deep breaths before reacting to failure and trying to cultivate curiosity about the causes of failure. 
• Create psychological safety: Foster an environment where employees feel safe to take risks, experiment, and importantly, admit when they’ve failed so others can learn from it. This starts with admitting some of your own failures and applauding others when they share a failure to encourage continued openness.
• Reframe failure: The frame we put around our failures can radically change our ability to be open to learning from it. Is the failure in an unknown space or part of a process that would take even geniuses time to learn? Is the failure an opportunity to move closer toward an outcome we’re trying to achieve?
• Facilitate reflection and analysis: After experiencing failure, take time to let the initial emotions of shame or fear pass. Then, get together a group to reflect on what went wrong, why it happened, and what can be learned from the experience. Encourage different perspectives and honest feedback.

• Iterate and adapt: Iteration is at the heart of all entrepreneurship and innovation endeavors. Take occasional time to look back at how you got to where you are. What setbacks did you experience? How did you react? What did you learn? Seeing how excellence can be borne from failure encourages us to look more closely at our failures today.

 
Failure is a natural and necessary part of the innovation process. Our goal should be to create environments where everyone feels empowered to take risks, experiment and experience intelligent failures. 

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