🔒How to embrace, learn and adapt to failure to achieve success

“Fail More — Embrace, Learn, and Adapt to Failure as a Way to Success” by Bill Wooditch (McGraw-Hill Education, $28.).

When you learned to ride a bicycle, did it have training wheels? Mine did. When the training wheels came off, did you fall a few times until you figured out how to maintain your balance? I have a scar on my elbow that reminds me I did. What from your childhood or adult life reminds you of failures and how choices made turned them into successes? Think about how different things would have been if you hadn’t made those choices. Keep these in mind as you read the book.

Like life, there are no sure things in business. Everything comes with a risk. The risks are magnified because decisions have impacts on stakeholders. Fear of failure keeps organizations from taking risks, which means they stick to what’s currently working — until that doesn’t work anymore. When that happens, it’s usually too late to try something else.

Good things happen when you take the lessons from failures and use “embrace, learn and adapt” to shape what’s next. Example: Google keeps track of its failures. At killedbygoogle.com, you’ll find tombstones for 137 services, 12 apps and 12 hardware products Google killed on its own.

You’ll find birth-death dates; some had a relatively long life but became outdated; others were killed quickly because Google recognized they weren’t going to achieve their expected outcomes. Click on tombstones and you’ll find obituaries; you’ll also find many references to elements that were incorporated into other “new and improved” Google services, apps and hardware.

Google employees don’t view this as an idea graveyard. They think of it as a reference library of creativity that remembers what didn’t work, what no longer worked, what was resurrected and how failure can help shape the future. It’s also a place to revisit ideas whose time had not yet come.

Wooditch characterizes decision-making as waging battle “against the need for certainty and the discomfort of uncertainty.” By pushing the boundaries of your comfort zone outward, by applying what was learned and staying inquisitive, you will avoid the danger zone of same old same old.

He provides a three-step, boundary-pushing way to frame failure so you don’t fear it: 1. Ask: “What’s the worst that could happen?” Then, “Identify the worst possible scenario.” Describe all its gory details. Next, provide perspective by writing down everything that could be lost and what it would take (e.g. actions, time, money, people, etc.) to recover.

2. “Expand your choices.” Create “options, options, and more options.” Using your worst-case scenario as a yardstick, evaluate each by asking: “What happens if?” Use bullet points to develop a response tree, with each response being a separate “trunk.”

Ask that question again for each response to create bullet-point branches for each trunk. There will be trees whose branches you can control (i.e. pruning, fertilization) and those out of your control (market forces). Your trees become a decision forest, from which you can make informed choices. You will also find that the responses identify other options that may not have been apparent until you began branching.

3. Now that you’ve selected the best option, remember: “Labels limit. Don’t be so quick to label something as a failure.” Plans rarely go as planned or stay on their original timetable. Throughout the process, examine milestone results and develop action-steps that respond to what’s happening. When evaluating potential actions, use the steps in numbers 1 and 2 to help you make the what’s-next decision.

Mindset reset — “Failing more” triggers for “trying more.”