Why Your Team Needs a Philosophy of Failure

Tconventional wisdom is not quite right: failure is not a great teacher. It is how we reflect on failure that provides instruction.

This is something I learned firsthand – repeatedly – while starting NextArrow, my own leadership training company. Anyone who has ever started a company knows that in the beginning, even when things are going well, mistakes can come fast and furious: my colleagues and I were too eager to say yes to every opportunity, even when it wasn’t a good one match.We hired people based on their impressive qualifications, not their worth. We had no mechanism in place to alert us when clients did not sign a contract before we provided our services.

For a while we tried to just get over each mistake, deciding each time to just be in a hurry enough to deny it. An employee left after it became clear that he did not fit the values? We’d just hire the next person even faster. We may be making a few small changes to the interview process. But inevitably, it wouldn’t be long before we ran into another problem.

Until there was a moment of reckoning: Mistakes were piling up, but there was no room in the way we worked to consider them – and over time it became clear to me that my team was missing a valuable opportunity. We needed norms, values, rituals that allowed us to slow down and spend some time with our failures.

This was perhaps one of the most important implementations I have had since NextArrow was founded.

Right now more than ever, complexity, change and uncertainty are woven into the way we work. Over the past two and a half years, organizations have had to create entirely new business models and change their operations on a massive scale. Many of them, even the successful ones, have failed to some extent. It is up to company leaders not to avoid these failures—a futile exercise for any organization—but to ensure that these failures are stepping stones to learning and growth.

It’s a goal that’s easier said than done when admitting failure goes against our basic human system. Research shows how psychologically devastating it can be, causing shame and eroding self-esteem. This is why most people attribute their success to their efforts and their failure to their circumstances, a bias known as the fundamental attribution error.

Meanwhile, most organizations are hyper-focused on bottom lines, have a low tolerance for experimentation, and provide little time for reflection, all of which create an environment incompatible with learning. Here’s how to make sure that’s not the case for you.

First, do a malfunction audit.

Most leaders have unexamined assumptions about failure that influence how they operate. To bring these biases to light, take a few minutes to conduct what I like to call a failure audit. Think about your team’s last few significant failures. How did you handle each one? Looking back, what could you have done better?

For example:

• What happened: When Jane failed to meet her deadline, I said, “I’m very unhappy about this. Let’s make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
• What Could Have Happened: I used our one-on-one conversation to ask Jane about what happened. From our conversation, it became clear that she was working on several projects and didn’t know which one to prioritize, causing things to fall through the cracks. This led us to implement a color-coded system in our team to signal what is urgent and what can be put on the back burner.

Second, ask for feedback.

Make it a regular habit to address your blind spots by encouraging colleagues to share feedback in one-on-one or team meetings. Research shows that psychological safety increases over the long term when leaders are open to their own areas of development.

If you feel uncomfortable at first, you can start with a line like, “As part of my own development, I’m trying to get better at managing mistakes and failures.” Then ask where you have room to grow, and what you would you could do to better help your team learn from mistakes.

Third, come up with a philosophy of failure.

It is a memorable phrase that people can easily understand and remember.

At NextArrow, for example, our values ​​are based on the songs we love. As a company that employs more than one Britney fan, we’ve adopted “Oops!… I did it again” as shorthand for reporting a mistake on Slack and in meetings, and as a prompt to remind each other to stretch.

Here are some examples of failure philosophies that others have come up with:

Whatever phrase you choose, make it something that feels authentic and meaningful to your team.

Fourth, weave your failure philosophy into the way you work.

Destigmatizing failure means treating it as a normal and sometimes healthy consequence of working in a complex environment.

In interviews, ask questions like, “How did you deal with mistakes in the past?” and “What are your best failures?”

As you introduce employees, say, “This is how we approach mistakes and failures on our team.” (NASA shares a compendium called “Rules of Flight,” which is a collection of missteps, disasters, and lessons learned).

In team meetings, say, “I know we didn’t get the result we wanted, but let’s see what we can learn from the input.”

Creating rituals around your failure philosophy—a practice embraced by some of the world’s most innovative teams—also helps make failure feel less lonely and more instructive. A few examples:

• Both Gray and P&G present annual “Heroic Failure” awards to the people and teams who have taken the biggest “smart” risk in the company.
• At X Development, LLC (formerly Google X), we often give a failure bonus when a team kills their own project for a good reason.
• Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly was throwing “failure parties” to celebrate excellent scientific work that led to a dead end.

Finally, shine a light on your own failures. Slogans and rituals alone will not help a team whose leader says one thing and does another. As Navy Seal Team 6 Commander Dave Cooper said, “The most important words a leader can say are, ‘I screwed up.’

When you have the courage to speak these words freely, the question is not “Will we fail?” but rather “How will we learn from our failures?”

Biography: Roy Ben-Yehuda is the founder and CEO of Next arrow, an organization dedicated to helping innovative teams and leaders develop the courage to achieve excellence. His work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Training Industry, and The Daily Beast. Previously, Roy taught courses and seminars on negotiation and conflict management at Columbia University, Princeton University, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. You can follow him on LinkedIn here.