It’s OK to fail
Years ago, when I was a teenager working as a summer camp counsellor, I was given a very valuable lesson in the expectation of success. (Full disclosure: I have yet to actually learn this lesson, but I’m trying. Lordy, am I trying.)
I was caring for a four-year-old whose mum had gone on an overnight trip, and as the day grew darker, my little charge became more and more anxious. I cuddled and soothed her, but nothing helped — she wanted her mum.
Her whimpers turned to full-on crying and I, agitated at the prospect of failing my job so completely, began to shush the poor kid. Obviously, this didn’t help, but I was dogged in my determination to ‘make it work’.
So I kept on. The harder she cried, the more I shushed, until the child astounded me by pausing mid-sob, staring me straight in the eye, and hollering at me with absolute righteousness,
“Don’t you know?! It’s OK to cry!!”
I was speechless. Of course it’s OK to cry — especially when you’re four. Who the hell was I to insist this kid buck up and ‘make it work’ when, clearly, it just wasn’t working?I was speechless. Of course it’s OK to cry — especially when you’re four. Who the hell was I to insist this kid buck up and ‘make it work’ when, clearly, it just wasn’t working?
Like it or not, failure IS an option
I summon this anecdote because I think it speaks to a culture of fear of failure — a culture I am very much a part of.
Most people are taught, both implicitly and explicitly, by a variety of teachers, that failure is not acceptable. So we equate little-picture failure with big-picture failure, and we learn that in order to be good at something, and to have worth, we must expect and deliver success all the time.
This is ridiculous, but it’s the way we are, and it is crippling the very spirit of innovation.
What’s so bad about a little bit of failure?
On Friday 4 December, Mike Butcher, the Editor of TechCrunch Europe, stopped by chez Made by Many for chat.
We’d invited Mike round to tell him about the work we’re doing with to help UK tech businesses get started in new markets. We’re designing a free, collaborative, peer-to-peer knowledge exchange (you can find out all about it on Going Global) and we’re getting pretty excited about it.
We discussed our project in some detail (see A chat with Mike Butcher), but we soon settled into the broader topic of success and failure… and why we’re so hung up on them.
Mike pointed out that in Europe, and in the UK in particular, we fear failure. We tend to see it as an end, and a comment on our worth. We do this because we see success and failure as an either/or pairing: two opposite states with no possibility of overlap.
Naturally, we want to be successful… but this means we’ve also become averse to failure, dogmatically so. And this is dangerous for two reasons.
Firstly, by making it unacceptable to fail, we’re making things harder on ourselves — and to what end? As that precocious four-year-old pointed out, sometimes it all gets a bit much and you just can’t hack it.
But secondly, and this is the bit that’s really relevant to the work we’re doing, once this aversion becomes institutionalised, the poison spreads: ideas aren’t allowed to fail, even if they should. And in an effort to avoid failure, we avoid risk, which means we start aiming a little lower.
The fruits of this slightly compromised labour are not-quite-good-enough ways of thinking and working. These get propped up and become incorporated into our lifestyles, because the alternative would be for them to fail, and we don’t want that (especially after we’ve spent lots of money propping them up). So we don’t allow them to fail — success at any cost, right?
But the problem with ‘success at any cost’ is that the cost is HIGH. Really, really astronomically high. (Um… economic crisis, anyone…?)
Why this is relevant to us right now
The whole ‘failure friendly’ discussion isn’t new, but it’s worth dragging out of the cupboard and re-examining, especially because we’re about to make a big contribution to start-up culture.
This project (the one we’re blogging about on Going Global) offers an opportunity to do something right for the British tech industry, and this is where our discussion got really interesting.
Mike suggested we look at a book called Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. It explores a start-up-friendly culture, where, if someone wants to do something and has a plan, they tend to get funded more often than not. The book cites Israel’s as “a business climate in which risk is embraced and good ideas are given a chance to grow” (quote from the Publishers Weekly Editorial Review).
The successful side of failure
This culture of fail-friendliness and the widespread acceptance of managed risk brings about a sort of accelerated Darwinism, where the faster you fail, the faster you get to the right idea and succeed. By and large, the UK and Europe are adverse to risk and failure, whereas Israel and the US, to a lesser degree, tend to be more willing to dive in, even if failure is a very real possibility.
Mike’s suggestion to us, and it’s one we’re keen to take on board, is to make our service fail-friendly. Shoot straight with people: not only won’t you always succeed, but in fact, you shouldn’t. Informed, managed risk is healthy. Failing fast and early means a softer fall and, in the best cases, a shorter time to success.
So what can we do to live this message?
Ben Malbon of BBHLabs reckons that “to fail is to learn” and suggests agencies like ours embrace a continuous beta mentality. This is something we can and should do.
Our own Mike Laurie has also blogged about agencies and failing, and how this is not necessarily a bad thing… far from it, actually.
Thus far, we’ve been sharing our work and opening it up to criticism on Going Global, and we’ll continue to to do this. As the project advances, we can also spread this message with content on the service, and in a more granular way, in the copy that speaks to the user and tells the story of what we’re doing. We can also take a nod from Ben Malbon and go beta sooner than later.
Stand up, dust off, and get back on the horse
I think it’s high time we rethink the failure-success binary and instead embrace failure as a necessary step on the way to success. Once we do this, a new definition emerges: that of failure as the working-through of weaker ideas and executions, so that stronger ideas and executions can come together and be tested.
The bottom line: some element of failure is necessary to achieve success. We believe this, and we are committed to making our work reflect this.
6 comments
I was at a party in Palo Alto a few years ago with some venture capital types, and one of them told me something that has stuck with me: there are three types of outcomes for startups, and two are acceptable: success and failure. Success rocks, and failure sucks, but at least you get answers either way. The worst thing that can happen with a startup is for the outcome to be unclear. VCs favor a plan that says “if you give me this, we will do this, and x will happen”. The result gives you something to use for a decision: put more money in? change strategy? abandon ship?
In other words, put together a solid plan, go hard, and don’t be afraid to fail. Just be ready to learn from failures.
Nice point Robbie.
And nice post Sara.
I’ve worked for agencies that would just build web sites without ever actually testing them at all. And they would fail pretty badly. But with good prototyping, instead of failing expensively you fail cheap. The cheaper you can make failure, the better.
The saddest thing is when businesses fail really expensively yet never learn from their mistake.
Nice post, Sara. I think that businesses struggle with this, just as individuals do, as you say. They key is that don’t have to fail in public. I would argue that going public early is often the best way to go, but this is completely unsuitable for some organisations.
have
The other important point is that you need to find out about failure as fast as you can. Prototyping is one way to find out whether your idea is any good, and agile is another, and of course they’re not mutually exclusive.
as fast as you can
Most of us are better editors than we are creators. On the whole, our critical faculties are more finely attuned than our imaginative ones (maybe conditioned by our fear of failure?), and we often find it easier to suggest changes to things that already exist than we do to come up with new things. For me, this is the biggest selling point for working in an agile fashion.
I’ve yet to work on an agile project that didn’t seem at least somewhat risky and nebulous when we started. But they quickly start to acquire structure, and inherent questions that you hadn’t even considered before reveal themselves under interrogation. I think if you wait until you’re sure you’re doing the right thing, you’ve waited too long, and missed the chance to make something even better.
Robbie yours is a very timely comment. I’ve been thinking about this third outcome a lot, of late, and I’m convinced you and your VC pal are right: it’s the unclear ending that’s going to keep you up at night for years to come, not the failure.
Why I’ve been thinking about this:
A friend of mine has just started up and things… are… dragging. She’s struggling to get and grow business, but she’s still surviving. The current situation is sustainable, especially if it gets better bit by bit, but it’s not the success she hoped for… yet neither is it the abject failure she feared.
My friend is a clever cat and she is exceptionally good at what she does, but she’s staring those three outcomes in the face and struggling to make sense of them.
She’s not looking at success, yet — that much is clear. But neither is she looking at a fail (at least not yet). She’s closer to that third outcome and she finds that as unacceptable as your VC guy did. So what to do?
When yours isn’t a clear case of failing fast, as James rightly suggests we aim to do (versus failing slow), how do you know when you’ve tried hard enough?
This is what my friend is struggling with: business plans have changed as the business has developed, so her original definitions of success an failure don’t fit. So how does she know when to walk away?
Wired has a great article on this “third outcome” called Learn to Let Go: How Success killed Duke Nukem which is really worth a read.
Learn to Let Go: How Success killed Duke Nukem
I definitely agree with Mike that failing cheaply is essential, the unfortunate case for a lot businesses is that the more expensive something is the less likely failure will be admitted. Knowing when to fold is the best talent in poker.
I do think there is a greater talent agencies and clients can learn than how to make failure work for them and that is knowing you might not have the right answer at the beginning.
Unfortunately the way the industry can make agencies act is as the “omnipotent advisor” to a client who knows everything and has all the right answers. Something we know is not true but agencies often forced to play that role by clients on the basis of “I’m paying you sooo much money, you are meant to be the experts, how can you not have the answers?” and a client may leave a agency that says “We don’t know the answer to that yet” for one that is more confident but not necessarily more right.
Stuart
The above has been really interesting for me to read. With the arrogant assumption of success common (any many would argue, essential) to most entrepreneurs, failure didn’t enter into my mind until I was nose to nose with it. Deciding how to handle it, how to accept it and how to appreciate it has given me the control over my previous concept of failure. Facing failure taught me three things:
1) failure is like a megaphone for your gut. With a clear yes or no, move or stop, give up or precede decision, your gut (and, yes, your bottom line) if often the deciding factor. If your passion and commitment to eating beans on toast three meals a day is fading fast and the voice inside that says, “maybe this isn’t worth it” is getting louder, then it’s time to listen. Ask your gut if it speaking from fear or the simple realisation that it’s time to change course? If you give it the proper stage, your gut will sing out the truth.
2) embracing little failures is key to success. Not every proposal or pitch will win business. Not every client interaction will inspire. It’s the why that matters. These little failures are feedback that will inform greater success. Listening to them, and hearing them, can help to prevent larger issues
3) power comes from realising it’s not you, it’s your idea that failed. I was on the brink of packing it in. In fact, it was so bad I was soliciting the advice from anyone I could find and even got a mention above from the lovely Sara. What empowered me to make the decision of one more kick at the can or to walk away was the realisation that even if it didn’t work, I didn’t fail. The idea didn’t work. The variables out of my control were more than I could overcome right now. However, I took the chance. Most of my friends have never taken the risk I have. Most have never even considered it. So, whilst failure was so close I could taste it, I used it as the bitters in an overall sweet cocktail of success. When I had the power of that realisation, I was able to look more rationally at all contributing issues, tackle the ones I could, set a deadline and make a logical decision. Luckily, it worked.
Yes, failing fast is better than losing your house or all of your confidence, but the key is that not all failure is bad. It’s opportunity to say at least you tried – which is more than most can say.
Sara, thanks for this thread. I learnt a lot.