Business Insight Zone

How much energy do you expend trying to avoid failure?

You could be forgiven, reviewing certain early years of my career, if you thought that my main goal was to avoid ever being seen to make a mistake. This has been true even at times when I knew that forging ahead and making productive (or instructive) mistakes would have been much better for my career, not to mention my psyche. The psychology of human performance is a tricky thing.

Particularly if you have a record of achievement behind you (and you should have seen my high-school transcripts!), you can easily get trapped in thinking that you must always succeed. It’s a mindset that can keep you from stretching yourself to go after bigger goals: you aim at closer targets so that you can be totally sure of hitting them — even when that means foregoing more distant, more meaningful objectives.

Jo Rowling’s abject failure.

I’m thinking of all this because I’ve just listened to J. K. Rowling’s excellent Harvard commencement address, which focuses on the merits of failure:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.

Very good words to hear at a commencement — especially for the successniks of Harvard. But let’s turn these thoughts to practical account for ourselves, eh?

The Business Side of Failure

We have funny ways of dealing with failure in business. In many cases, we look for a scapegoat, or we brand someone as “a Failure” even if they happen to be a smart, capable person who fell short only in one particular case. The taint of failure can cling to a person even when the failure arose because of circumstances beyond their control, just as the aura of success sometimes surrounds the person who accidentally stumbled into something good. (Feel free to throw in famous or personal examples of these in the comments.)

If these cases are too extreme, think instead of how we talk about failure in our everyday work. Or rather, think of how we often don’t talk about failure, as though it doesn’t exist.

We all know people (maybe we are those people?) who are “never wrong about anything,” who can never admit that they screwed up. And we know others who literally are never wrong about anything, because they “fail by default,” in Rowling’s words — that is, because they never commit themself to any particular position.

Where does that leave us?

Sure, some people can talk honestly about failures without aversion. Still, when we look across the board, we see at least three negative behaviors:

• Typecasting people because of certain past performances;
• Dishonesty — with oneself, with others — about failings;
• Timidity.

These behaviors do untold damage to individual careers — like they did to mine, in the early years. Just think of the contrasts with the benefits of failure that Rowling describes: Instead of stripping away the inessential, we cling to the inessential because it masks our frailties. Instead of focusing on what’s most important, we can waste our time developing unhealthy expertise in CYA and buck-passing. And instead of channelling the lessons of failure into a new resolve toward success, we sit back timidly, hoping never to learn the lessons of failure in the first place.

Now set those personal costs aside and think about what these behaviors cost our organizations. If your organization falsely labels individuals — makes “pets” or “goats” out of them — it may hamper competent people while elevating less-competent ones. When I talk to friends at other companies, I hear plenty of stories about the ways that people are encouraged by the culture to be dishonest about their own performance and others’. And plenty of organizations stagnate slowly because of their aversion to even the sanest calculated risks.

My own commitment to failure.

Of course I want to succeed — financially, as a family man, as a writer, and so on. But when I read back over the year-plus of posts on this blog, I wonder whether I’ve taken enough of those sane, calculated risks with my analysis. In other words, I think I’ve been too averse to failure.

To a degree, this is understandable: Hoover’s stock-in-trade is authoritative information on companies and industries. Hoover’s parent company, Dun & Bradstreet, makes a particular specialty of calculating credit and risk profiles for millions of businesses around the world. So in a metaphorical sense, my company offers a sort of insurance — in the form of robust, accurate information — against the uncertainties of the business world.

It’s easy, writing under the Hoover’s aegis, to think “Well, I’m not sure that X is going to happen,” or “It’s really just my opinion that Y matters to the way the markets are going.” Easy. Understandable. Safe.

But where does that get us? First, it denies you whatever good insights I may have built up from years of concentrated study of companies, industries, and workplace practices. Beyond that, it frustrates me — there’s that tricky psychology of human performance again — when too many of my ideas end up on the cutting-room floor. Note that these pains are self-inflicted, too, since my writing here has never been censored.

Enough, already.

Enough risk aversion, that is. You should understand that the opinions I express here are my own — not those of Hoover’s or D&B — and that they’re offered to you as food for thought, and not because I think you should invest on my say-so, or because I think that the industries and governments of the world should change their practices to match my ineffable wisdom. (Maybe they should, but that’s not what I’m after.)

My goal is to give you a couple of things every day:

• pithy, thought-provoking reflections on how we work, and how we think about how we work;
• juxtapositions of ideas — across industries, disciplines, historical eras — that help you and me both to better understand the world in which we do business.

Once in a while, I’ll also throw in something completely different — like the poem I posted just before this. If I do all of this right, you’ll get something here that you don’t get anywhere else. Ideally, you’ll walk away with a fresh perspective (on oil prices, on multitasking, on social media, or whatever) that helps you as you dive back into your work.

I hope so, because I want you to make this a regular destination in your online itinerary. And to those of you who are already regular readers, thank you.

There’s one more way to say what I want to achieve. In a new interview published in the Guardian, British science-fiction writer Charles Stross says that MMORPG’s like World of Warcraft have figured out a winning formula: “Build a world that people want to inhabit, and the inhabitants will come.” Though I can’t promise orcs or dragons in this realm, that’s exactly what I want to accomplish, too — to make this a space that you want to inhabit.

Failures? They’re inevitable, but that’s okay.

In this I’m guided not only by the advice of Jo Rowling, but also by that of another famous writer (one who enjoyed slightly less commercial success than Rowling did with her Harry Potter books). As I noted back in January, Samuel Beckett offered an inspired piece of advice — not just for writers but for anyone in business — when he said:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

The floor is now open — and will remain open — for your own diagnoses and remedies for failure, whether they apply to companies, industries, or the work of yours truly.

How can organizations “fail better”?

How can I?

~

(Hat tips to Kevin Kelly and Gretchen Rubin for pointing to Rowling’s speech. Photo by All Glory To The Hypnotoad. [!] )