Leveraging failure

Success and failure are sometimes viewed as opposites and mutually exclusive. After all, if you’re a success, then you’re not a failure, right? However, to be successful means to fail–a lot. To illustrate, consider the research of Phillip Cassey and Tim Blackburn. Cassey and Blackburn looked into publication rates of successful scientists and found that the people who published the most papers also had their papers rejected more often. Turned out, these eminent scientists were more successful because they risked (and experienced) failure far most often than their less successful colleagues.

One guy who has given failure a lot of thought lately is Frode Odegard. Frode is a real go-getter, entrepreneurial jet-setter. By anyone’s standards, Frode is a successful guy. However, his latest endeavor is called The Failure Project. His idea, put simply, is pursue failures. But productively. Instead of worrying about failure, actively go after it and fail forward, rapidly and relentlessly. By speeding through what doesn’t work, and reaping insight, you’ll experience more and greater success than if you waited to try to get it “right” the first time.

One of the tricks of leveraging failure is to gather insight and determine what went wrong. In other words, fail forward. Turns out, there’s a right way to do this. In some innovative research conducted with the Israeli Army, scientists determined that failure is amazing helpful even when experiencing success. The researchers found that when a project is a total failure, it doesn’t matter whether participants focus on what went wrong or what went right; the only thing that mattered was the after-event review. Interestingly, successful projects were leveraged when participants carefully reviewed what went wrong (even though the project, as a whole, was successful).

So here’s your challenge: during your weekly review (you do these, right?), find something that worked (a success, in other words) and unpack it. What went wrong in the midst of the overall success? Then pick a failure and unpack it (it doesn’t matter if you focus on what went right or what went wrong, just think it over). What insights do you get? What do you learn from this that will make a difference next time?

And stay tuned. Next week, I’m interviewing Frode for my podcast–more to come on the power of failure!