Is Failure in the Story You Tell? Maybe it Should Be.

You can get to know a company, department or organization by the stories they tell.

Failure isn't usually the topic of most organizational stories, but maybe it should be.

Consider our addiction to success stories. We promote them, commercialize and import them in the hope that they will motivate our sales force, development team and management. Take a look around the office in most organizations and you are likely to find a favorite success author or two on both desks and waiting rooms. Here is the challenge-- those success stories might be the entirely wrong ones to tell, because real success always involves getting past failure.

Does our penchant for success stories lead us to make failure something that we cannot consider? Is failing an object of shame that is not even pondered, as we take on new challenges and opportunities?

The truth is that both growth and innovation are messy. Our success culture, in which we promote and sell the successes of a few, can blind us to the reality of how success really happens, and create a fear of anything other than an immediate and complete win. Success really happens by passing through a series of experiments in which less than positive outcomes point us toward what will work. But the courage to do this is only possible when we give ourselves and those around us permission to fail.

The stories we tell should lean heavily on tales of challenge and the journey to overcome real setbacks, lending courage to those who may be somewhere in the cycle of learning from failure.

Rather than pretending we will should never fail, and that every idea and approach we try will work in an amazing way on the first try, we should get beyond the Game of the Emperor's New Clothes and confirm that learning to drive does involve a few panic filled moments, and that trying a new recipe may or may not please our dinner guests because all important advances carry with them a log book full of failed efforts. Re-inventing ourselves may take more than one try.

If we take the shame out of failure, we can get better at learning from it.

If we start with this kind of reality, then we can get smarter about the process. I'm learning a few things from the Lean Start-up Approach at FredX that can make this process less painful and more productive. By starting with permission to fail:

I approach each element of a new activity with a learning attitude.

I can plan to glean everything possible from each experiment.

I can work to fail more quickly, so that great amounts of time and resource aren't wasted in the process.

I can intentionally view each step as a learning process.

I can arrive at solutions that work in a more powerful way.

From whom do we get permission to fail and then get up again? We begin by giving ourselves that permission--it's another word for courage. We should also work to create homes, workplaces and schools where this permission is given and then followed up by grace as people learn through their failures. This combination of personal courage and environments that are focused on learning and not just performance is powerful. Just think, If you gave yourself permission to fail, what might you try to accomplish?

Environments where smart failure is not only permitted but encouraged can be identified by the stories they tell. If your place of business tells stories about the experimental process in a way that includes humor and appreciation, then you are on the right track. Stories that only talk about success without identifying the real process it took to arrive there may be more damaging than motivational. This is not only true in the invention space, but in every endeavor.