The fail-fast mindset is everywhere in our society today. Fail fast, fail often, and pivot often has been a very popular mantra in the business world since the last great financial crisis in 2008. Its primary purpose was to minimize the psychological and economic impact of losing. Keep on trying to fail rapidly and keep on pivoting until failure does not happen anymore. Hopefully, we will have gained enough momentum before running out of resources and energy from all the failures. How is a mindset that looks forward to failing fast and failing often still the de facto success formula in the world today?
Maybe for someone who is privileged with plenty of financial resources, it might be a fun adventure to take bold actions with the intention to fail. Most of us cannot afford to fail once, let alone failing often. In the event that we take a chance and fail, we will not have the luxury and the financial capability to pivot and start again and again until we find success.
Feel-good business strategy
As many of my friends in top leadership roles in some of the biggest companies in the world often say, “Let alone failing fast, failure just wasn’t an option when I was faced with this crisis.” In spite of this, the premier management consultants on their advisory board keep insisting that the only way to innovate and succeed in this new world is to celebrate failure and make failing fast a desirable goal.
When your reputation as a leader and the livelihoods of the people who depend on you are at stake, failure cannot be the outcome we should be looking forward to, regardless of how fast and often it is. For those of us who grew up failing often without intending to fail, we know that it isn’t so cool to fail fast and fail often intentionally now that we have tasted some success and stability.
So, why are so many smart people in the world today trying to start their mission with the goal of failing fast?
We are all afraid of losses, pain, and embarrassment. Human beings do not like to experience such feelings. Ironically, these are exactly the same feelings associated with failure. One way of keeping away from the pain of failure is to avoid taking actions that have a high risk of leading to negative outcomes. However, leaders have to drive their organizations into the future. The future is always unknown and risky by nature. Therefore, leaders have no choice but to take risks. As a shortcut solution to this, leaders have been taught to hack their minds to believe that failing is a good thing. By setting failure as a goal, they are protecting themselves from feeling all the pain that comes after the inevitable failures.
Some take it to the next level and actually celebrate failure. This has been going on in the business world for over a decade now, and it is such a feel-good strategy that it has become extremely popular.
Failure hurts—especially when you don’t learn from it
I have used the fail-fast methodology for many years in my personal and professional lives on dozens of critical projects. I used to believe in it very religiously. In the end, I concluded that it’s not an effective approach because it gives you a false sense of progress and can be very costly in the long run without you realizing it. Just like alcohol and drugs numb people’s pains, celebrating failure suppresses the real problem. I believe that this is a big mistake, and it’s the root cause of many problems in society today because when you start a journey with the expectation to fail, your first instinct is to accept roadblocks as failures and give up too fast or pivot rapidly to your next idea. As a result, you won’t go as far as needed to experience your breakthroughs.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that failure is not important. What I am emphasizing is that we should not be looking forward to failure when starting any journey. It is extremely important to learn profoundly and learn fast from your failure so that you can grow to the next and better version of yourself.
Failing is painful, but it’s even more painful when you don’t learn and evolve from it.
We should definitely not be celebrating failure because by associating a positive feeling to it, we will not learn from it. We should be aiming and planning everything so that we succeed, but if and when failure comes, we should take the time to feel the pain and let it sink in. We need to experience the emotional pain of failure and then ask ourselves what we can learn from this. What could we have done better so that we know better for next time?
It is important to experience the pain of your failures. Learn deeply from them to earn your breakthroughs to the next level. It will make you stronger and wiser, faster.
From the book Failing Fast?: The 10 Secrets to Succeed Faster {Innovation Done Right} by Luv Tulsidas. Copyright © 2024 by Luv Tulsidas. Used with permission of Forbes Books, Charleston, South Carolina.
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