Fail Harder – The Counter Culture to ‘Everyone’s a Winner’.

Argyle is agile.

Because of this, we have a lot of agile friends and one thing I’ve noticed about the agile community is the acceptance of failure culture. Failure culture seeks to break the taboos associated with failure and repackages the efforts that don’t quite land as learning moments and opportunities for growth.

That’s odd for me. I grew up in the ‘there are no losers’ 90′s where everyone got a ribbon for participating and there were no mistakes, just happy accidents. So when this idea of failure culture was launched with Zuck’s famous line, “move fast and break things,” it seemed like a breath of fresh air.

But even fresh air gets stale and as failure transitioned from a novel concept to an accepted adage, the flaw in the theory started to shine through: failure is a safety net. Far from being the harsh but fair teacher, failure became the catch all for those who gave it their all and came up short, the modern day participation ribbon.

Failure became celebrated. A badge of honor, to say that you had failed was to say you had tried and, in the end, wasn’t that all that really mattered?

No, of course not.

Failure is valuable because it sucks. Failure is valuable because it is a real and concrete reminder of what you have to lose and it should instantly cause you to reassess you direction and decisions. Failure is reality and should be treated accordingly.

The proper way to fail.

Accept the mistake. You failed because you made a mistake. Even failures caused by forces that seem outside of your power can ultimately come back to you. Supply failure? Where’s your backup supplier? Communication failure? Why didn’t you check to make sure the buyer was on the same page? There’s almost always something you can do, so assess what went wrong and what steps you could take to fix it.

Assess the damage. Did things not quite go according to plan? Did everything fall apart? Did you land somewhere in the middle? There are many shades of failure, from successful plans that didn’t go perfectly to outright breakdowns. What level of failure did you reach?

Salvage the project. Complete failure is rare. Sending out the wrong email to 10,000 prospects can be turned on its head to seem more endearing and human. Botched display campaigns can provide tons of data about the customers you don’t want. Every cloud has a silver lining, and every failure has some kind of success. Now’s the time to put the failure behind you and start looking towards what worked.

Start again. You’re smarter now. If you have accepted your mistake, realistically assessed and addressed the damages, and done what you can to save the project, you have made yourself more savvy and should squeeze that for all it’s worth. That’s what your boss did, after all she’s just the person who has failed better than everyone else.

TL;DR

Failure isn’t fun and it’s dangerous to think it is. Accept that failure sucks, learn from the suckiness, and become a better person

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/strategy/fail-harder-the-counter-culture-to-everyones-a-winner-0593686?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fail-harder-the-counter-culture-to-everyones-a-winner