{"id":21428,"date":"2024-01-31T19:08:21","date_gmt":"2024-01-31T08:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/margiewarrellold.flywheelsites.com\/?p=21428"},"modified":"2024-01-31T19:08:21","modified_gmt":"2024-01-31T08:08:21","slug":"rethinking-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/margiewarrell.com\/rethinking-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"You think failure is hard? Not near as hard as learning from it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Failing is hard. But not near as hard as learning from it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Thomas J. Watson, former CEO of IBM, once said, \u201cIf you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It sounds good. Yet it\u2019s not wholly true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure, risking failure is crucial for success. Not stupid failure \u2013 the kind that results from testing the depth of water with both feet. Rather, the well-considered variety: the \u2018intelligent failures\u2019 essential to advance through uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet having the courage to risk failure, even the smart kind, is not the full “golden ticket” to achieving great things. The other half of the ticket is the ability to learn and apply the lessons that failure holds.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And therein lays the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While failing is always hard, it’s not nearly as difficult as learning from it.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The chief barrier to learning from failure is not its complexity, it is us. It stems from our resistance (unconsciously directed by fear) to confront our failures honestly, to examine them thoroughly, and to identify their deeper causes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my recent  podcast<\/a> with Amy Edmondson<\/a>, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, she unpacked the common elements of intelligent failure codified in her new book Right Kind of Wrong<\/em><\/a> (an excellent read!) She also categorized the key ways people fail to learn from failure, helping us avoid the double whammy of \u2018failing twice.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cLearning from failure isn\u2019t as easy as you\u2019d think.\u201d – Professor Amy Edmondson<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Zoom up high enough and you can generally see how every failure holds the seed of an equal or greater benefit, over time. However, you have to do your part to find the seeds of learning and facilitate their application to reap rewards over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To help you do that, here are three questions to help you get the very most out of your failure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

#1: Am I honestly examining the cause(s) of failure for maximum learning?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

 A study<\/a> by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler <\/a>and Ayelet Fishbach found that the most common response to failure is not to learn from it, but to brush over it. The researchers found that failure is \u201cego threatening, which causes people to tune out.\u201d \u2018Mine\u2019 your failure for every shred of insight and nugget of value, mindful that complex failures rarely have one simple cause and the higher you rise, the less likely you\u2019ll think it’s you. Research by Sidney Finkelstein from Dartmouth University found that senior leaders are less<\/em> likely to consider themselves as a source of failure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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