Failure Is the Only Option

Change means trying new things and failing. It means vulnerability and frustration to the point of anger. It means suffering. It means getting comfortable hanging upside down in your boat, under the icy water, without oxygen. It means hanging in there and continuing to function even when you look and feel foolish—and then rolling back up. It means failing and then recovering to continue on, and then failing again.

Business is about avoiding mistakes. We all want to appear competent. Success means knowing what to do and getting the job done. So we struggle with the idea that failing is part of the job of change. It is for kids, but once you stop being a toddler, it is no longer “cute” to fall over while walking down the hallway.

The crew of a traditional boat or ship would define failure as capsizing. No one wants to be captain of the Titanic, as failure is seen from the deck of a capsizing ocean liner. On the ocean liner, the ship goes down only once.

The world looks different from the deck of a kayak. In turbulent environments, capsizing is not only an option—it is an inevitability. You don’t win by fighting capsizing because you see it as failure. Rather, you plan to capsize. You practice how to minimize it. You learn to Eskimo roll so that when the water flips you over you know how to recover gracefully. Failure is part of the process. Whitewater kayaks are not particularly stable. This means that they can be flipped more easily, but it also means that they can be rolled back up more easily.

Without an Eskimo roll, however, a trip down a whitewater river can seem similar to capsizing on an ocean liner. If you flip and fail to make your roll in a kayak, you have to pop your spray skirt and swim for shore. It is always wet, often cold. Sometimes fellow paddlers will help, but you typically face a bewildering swim through rushing water—sucked under and popped back up, knocked against rocks—before you find land. Then you have to drag your tail out of the river and empty the water out of your boat, climb back in, put on your spray skirt, and continue on your way—until you hit the next wave right around the corner. Such “bagels” (a roll with a hole in it) typically amount to only an inconvenience. However, in some places on some rivers, such a swim could prove fatal. In any event, it is an exhausting and humiliating process, as fellow paddlers watch from the current. If you do this once or twice, you have a very strong incentive to perfect your roll.

Even if you are a stellar employee, your career will hit periods when you capsize through no fault of your own. You may find yourself in a bewildering new job, with a new boss, in a new organization, or out on the street. You can’t avoid this. It is just the way it is in whitewater. Since you can’t avoid it, you need to cultivate the ability for quick and efficient recovery from the inevitable disasters. You need to view iteration as a way of life, moving away from seeing your accomplishments as rungs on a career ladder to seeing them as journeys through different rapids or different rivers.

When you shoot rapids, at some point you will find yourself underwater. That fact probably qualifies as the only certainty in a turbulent environment. Clinging to the belief that you can avoid these spills is often more dangerous than accepting them. Recovery skills for turbulent environments are similar to the Eskimo roll in kayaking. Once you have these recovery skills, you can paddle into big water without fear of being capsized or tossed about.

Strategies for Failing Quickly and Recovering Gracefully

Treat Your Career as a Series of Experiments

Instead of moving from success to success, you can view your career as a series of experiments—some of which will fail. When an experiment in a lab does not produce the expected result, the researcher is not usually heartbroken. The failure merely shows one more thing that doesn’t work. Look at your career the same way, and you will focus less on perfection today than on building skills for tomorrow. The environment will not permit you to succeed all the time. You can be the best at what you do, but a merger or acquisition can rock your world by completely reshaping your organization. You can be a dynamite programmer in today’s language, but the language may change or the work may move to India. Failure merely signals that it is time to launch some new experiments.

The young employee who sees a career as a steady climb will shudder when rungs are missing or the ladder disappears. The experimenter will realize this one route upward didn’t work and promptly switch to exploring other routes. This will lead to a more open mind about the possibilities rather than a single-minded devotion to a path that doesn’t work. More experienced managers who must always be right and successful will not explore new ways to apply their skills or build new ones.

Minimize the Risk of Failure

First, work your way up to the big water. Start with runs on a Class I river with easy rapids. When you gain the skills from the small, but inevitable, failures (and successes!), you can take on more serious water. Developing yourself takes time and discipline.

Second, be honest about the true risks. People need to know what they are getting into and to be sure they have the skills to meet it. Also, be honest about your own capabilities...and those of others.

Third, find a way to fail that doesn’t kill you. Betting the ranch does not make for successful failure. If you want to move in a new direction, figure out what percentage of your time you should invest in this, and treat it like a risky financial investment.

Fourth, make sure that you pack your own chute. Remember the basics:

• Negotiate a sound employment contract on the way in, when you are on a roll, and when the labor market is hot.

• Keep your personnel file updated. Know what is in it and add concrete laudatory notes whenever possible. If your company won’t keep the file, then find someone who will.

• Live prudently. Make sure that you have access to money to keep you afloat for at least six months.

• Get out and about. Conferences, trade shows, and executive education provide the opportunity to learn as well as to see and be seen.

• Visit Monster.com and similar sites to stay abreast of opportunities. Consider checking employment agencies and headhunters before you need them.

• Think cell phone, call centers, and Internet and what you can do with those dominant and evolving technologies.

Practice Failing

Unfortunately, you cannot avoid failing or minimize it away, so you also need to improve how you fail. Kayakers spend their winters in swimming pools, practicing rolling their boats, working on offside rolls, and honing their reflexes. Basic technique matters. High-potential employees benefit greatly from receiving true challenges, challenges that will stretch them and give them the possibility of failure. One needs the experience of at least near-failure to practice handling one’s self amidst the emotional crosscurrents associated with the specter of failure. These career disasters, planned or unplanned, teach important lessons. People need to know what it feels like when their knuckles turn white.

People learn more from a process of “deliberate mistakes” than from successes.¹ In a stable environment, learning may prove important, so getting the job done is the focus. Learning and building your skills so that you can better understand and handle your environment matter more. And, like a pilot working in a flight simulator, you learn more if you make more mistakes. You need flexibility of action and resiliency of character. You may not have faced the particular challenge before, but you have faced similar ones. You have felt the fear and have survived. You have developed flexibility.

Prepare to Learn from Failure

Although you need comfort with failure, you also need to try not to make the same mistake twice: Learn from your mistakes. First, adjust your mindset. You have to go from seeing failure as an unthinkable horror to seeing it as an inevitable part of the journey. Take a look at Abraham Lincoln’s career. Or study George Washington, especially as a military commander, and his continued dedication to learn and to improve. And Winston Churchill’s career underwhelms prior to his rise to lead England through the perilous times of the Second World War.

Second, set out to do something. Learning comes easier if you have a hypothesis to test. Take the journey (and yourself) seriously enough to express and note your hopes and objectives. As the saying goes, “Fishing starts with throwing in your line.” Failure (or success) can only happen in relation to what one sets out to do. So, set out to do.

Third, keep records and debrief. Take the time to re-create the failure and to understand it.

Fourth, do not go it alone. Others can provide perspective and support and can help you learn. To get this support, however, you need to find and cherish relations with people capable of helping you when you most need it.

Make Your Mistakes on the Move

Amid turbulence, trajectory matters more than exact location. Follow the “Pareto principle” of focusing on the key 20 percent of your work or life that will yield 80 percent of the returns. Richard Koch, in Living the 80/20 Way, says the key to so much of modern life lies in identifying and pursuing this 20 percent. So much changes so fast that the current washes away the details. Many conscientious, detail-focused people thrived on the ocean liner and yet struggle to recognize that leading themselves and others turns on the 20 percent that yields 80 percent.

Locate what matters and move toward it. Failure to locate what matters increases the likelihood of getting lost. Being lost in whitewater carries fundamental risks—literally not knowing up (stream) from down (stream) in a rapid can lead to exhaustion, injury, and even death. Making progress or not depends on where one is headed. Learning, calibrating, re-energizing, and developing require relative movement toward that desired point.

Take a long view. The river keeps rolling, holding the possibility of a thousand more flips and rolls, a thousand more opportunities if you just keep paddling.

For too many, especially for too many of the talented, exhaustion takes over and the desire to journey dies. The head of a major clinical program at a national academic center volunteered that the biggest problem that he had in awarding various prestigious fellowships centered on finding people in their twenties with any spark left. Or, as he said, “They have great, even incredible resumes, but they’re done. The lights have gone out.”

Failing and Playing

Failing and playing are cousins. Failing involves a serious attempt to succeed in the face of risk. The main difference between failing and playing is the level of the consequences. Unless you are playing at the Roman coliseum, games usually involve loss of face but not loss of life.

Being able to fail gracefully and to recover quickly reduces the risks of play. A paddler who can roll is less at risk than one who has to swim. This means the paddler who can roll can afford a less conservative approach and have more fun. If you don’t have a roll, every time you try to play you will be flipped and will have to swim.

Endnote

1 Paul Shoemaker and Robert Gunther, “The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes,” Harvard Business Review, June 2006.