You are not born with a fear of failure; it’s not an instinct, it’s something that grows and develops in us as we get older.

Heather Hanbury

A few weeks ago, my daughter brought me a report card from school that had a score in primary science that I did not recall seeing her get before. I was quite befuddled by the mark, but I quickly noticed she was more distraught about it than I. Since it was morning and we were heading out to school, I told her we would discuss it when we got back in the evening. On my way home, I stopped at a KFC outlet, bought a bucket of fried chicken then got home and announced to her that we were eating to celebrate her failure. It’s one of those times I wished I had been ready with my camera – the look of shock on her face was one worth immortalizing in time!

From a very young age we are drilled to dread failure. We watch the winners applauded, celebrated and immortalized; the “losers” mocked, ostracized, bullied, made the pun of jokes. We quickly learn to do all we can to avoid being judged to have failed. That phrasing is intentional. It’s not that we do not fail, we do – quite a lot in-fact. However, failure is so highly stigmatized for many of us, we do not deeply engage with it to learn. Merriam Webster’s dictionary has 13 definitions of the context in which we use the word “fail”; 9 of those are contexts we are predisposed to avoid with great energy – losing strength, fading away, to fall short, become absent or inadequate, be unsuccessful (in achieving a passing grade), become bankrupt or insolvent, disappoint the expectations or trust of, to be deficient, leave undone. We correlate these contexts relative to our self-worth as being unfit, making us the ones to be weeded out for the survival of the fittest. Small wonder then that when we commit a fail our first instincts are often to look for someone or something to blame: a broken procedure, an inadequate law or regulation, a negligent or untrained individual, poor leadership, our DNA, something! We conceal or excuse our fails more often than we examine them for insights on how to improve. As Mathew Syed observed, writing in Black Box Thinking, “It is partly because we are so willing to blame others for their mistakes that we are so keen to conceal our own”.

Our fear of failure is paradoxical considering how essential failure is to the natural learning process. Its how evolution progressed, with adjustments appearing in contemporary generations to adapt for imperfections identified from ancestor versions; Babies learn to walk and talk by making many stumbles learning from each one to improve towards an acceptable finished result; most vocations are perfected through a learning process that records and analyses failures and works to improve based on that. It’s how carpenters, masons, sports professionals, engineers, landscaping experts, artists, musicians etc. learn to get good at what they do. It’s how those we have come to call inventors achieved, perfected and continue to improve their inventions, iterating their designs with lessons from each failure till they achieved their envisioned outcomes. In his book Mathew narrated an event in which a company, Unilever, tasked its scientists to develop a nozzle for use in its detergent manufacturing process and they deliberately went through 449 failures to arrive at the ideal design. Most everything we know today about good practices for managing businesses, selling, communication, strategic planning, governance, etc. has grown through the failures and learning of those who committed their lessons to the record four our learning.

We are not often exposed to how much of a role failure plays on the journey towards successful outcomes. Creative inventors, entrepreneurs, and artists are often profiled as having always been destined for success with IQ above their mates, beyond-average hard work habits, being kick-ass negotiators, strategists, out of the box thinkers; generally super powered heroes. We get them and their success stories ready-made, creating this myth in our minds that they were somehow pre-programmed to succeed in contrast to us. We come to regard failure as a blip in the process (a traumatizing, embarrassing blip), yet in fact it IS the process – the process of how we learn, create, evolve. Almost every instance of failure is a revelation of a deviation from what we expect. These deviations contain learning opportunities for us to challenge our assumptions, approach, materials and even realm of possibilities. It’s an invitation to engage our creative mind in solving problems with solutions we might otherwise have not conceived if unchallenged. However, if we stigmatize it, we end up spilling good learning opportunities, delaying the revelation of new innovations, business ideas, solutions to social challenges, etc. I for one can honestly say I have both missed and wasted several good failures in my lifetime.

If there is one choice more than any other that could flip this, it would be to alter the environment around us regarding how failure is both received and addressed. We can and should create environments in which it is safe, expected and even exciting to fail. I have read some interesting such efforts like holding failure celebration parties in an organisation (see? Someone had tried my KFC idea before I did it 😊); having school failure weeks; providing penalty free space for those who quickly self-report errors in their work; or even simply adjusting your immediate response to failure. In his book “The Art of Possibility”, Benjamin Zander, a conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, explains how he trains his students when they make mistakes to lift their arms in the air, smile and say, “How Fascinating!” Where we have celebrated only successes delivered, we could begin to praise each other for trying, for experimenting, for demonstrating resilience and resolve, for daring to learn through our own critical investigations and having the courage to see evidence for what it is rather than what we want it to be (Syed, Black Box Thinking). This way we begin to alter a narrative that celebrating only what goes right creates – that it is possible to succeed without failing.

In our KFC celebration I explained to my daughter how great an opportunity she had received by failing and walked with her through how she should ensure not to miss the chance to learn from the failure. Even now I am still trying to get her to be less afraid of failing. I am trying to get ME to be less afraid of failing. We are not born with a fear of failure; it’s not an instinct, it’s something that grows and develops in us as we get older. Which means it can be countered. A fantastic world of colour and wonder awaits discovery. New solutions, business ideas, inventions, await beyond the threshold of failure. Shake off the fear and learn to your heart’s content.

Recommended reading:

1. Black Box Thinking by Mathew Syed
2. The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
3. Adapt by Tim Harford
4. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2019/2020 Global Report