When we work from our clients’ office, their way of working often inspires us and we like to learn from them. So we sometimes steal their ideas a bit. Growth Tribe is known for their Getting Things Done mentality, and you really feel that vibe in their office. But another thing we noticed, and what surprised and inspired us most, is the way they celebrate failures.
The clichés
There is no such thing as failure, only learning experiences.
Failure is not the opposite of success, it is part of success.
Just two of the cliches you probably heard multiple times already. We know we need to try new things to learn, grow and become better. And when you try new stuff, chances are you will fail at first.
But how does it work in real life?
Do you really feel the space and time to make mistakes? And is it encouraging to do so?
For me personally, not really. I would rather do something ‘the first time right’ than to fail, even though I love to learn. Having success gives me a much better feeling than when something doesn’t work out. I generally feel disappointed and sometimes even angry when I don’t get the desired result (plus I get irritated – “I don’t have time for this”).
Fear of failure can really be demotivating and block us from trying. And that is where the real failure comes in…when we stop making any further attempts.
As Albert Einstein said:
A person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new.
So how could we turn this around?
I started doing some research. It turns out there are a lot of startups that find ‘trying and failing’ crucial to their success. This is what we can learn from their experiences:
Inc shares that creating a culture in which failing is celebrated and encouraged does not happen automatically. We need some kind of system or structure to create the room to try and fail. As long as our KPI’s are aimed exclusively at hitting targets and being efficient, taking a risk is not what we are inclined to do.
Innovation requires risk taking, perseverance, creativity and trying new things. So we do want to encourage this.
By the way, did you know half the discoveries in healthcare had an accidental origin (according to professor Paul Schoemaker)? The most famous of these is Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin.
There is also a more critical perspective on celebrating failures. It shows that only focussing on what doesn’t work, won’t give you the necessary insights to actually improve and find a successful solution. So it is important to also (or according to them even mainly) focus on what went well – what DID work.
Our inspiration
And this is exactly what they do at Growth Tribe. In their continuous Growth Process they keep track of all successes and failures, by making them visible on a Win and Fail Board. The learnings from the failures are shared in a Slack channel. And with every tenth failure they have a Fail Party. As they say: “the more failures, the more successes and learnings, in the end it is all about speed of experimentation”. Fun-fact: at a recent fail party they ordered sushi, it turned out to be bad and the whole office got sick…fail!
More successful and happy
Extra bonus according to lifehack.org is that in the process of failing and continuing to try, we strengthen our resilience and perseverance. And these qualities have been linked to a greater degree of lifelong success. People who exhibit resilience and perseverance are more likely to graduate from high school and college, more likely to find and keep a good job, and more likely to report higher degrees of happiness overall.
Two important takeaways
- If you want to encourage your employees to try new things, they should be incentivised to overcome their fear of failure.
- You need a system in place to actually learn from the failures. Document what worked and what didn’t work, so you know what to do differently next time.
Fuck Up Friday
What we implemented at LevelUp is what we saw at Growth Tribe: to celebrate our failures in a visible way in the office. We put up a Wall of Failure where we showcase failures and celebrate all the new things we have tried. We write down what worked, what didn’t work, what we learned and what the first next action is to take this further.
Every last friday of the month we celebrate Fuck Up Friday. Each person in the team shares their biggest failure of the past month. And bottles of champaign are to be won for: the biggest learning, the biggest risk taken and the most vulnerable confession.
So far, this approach is a huge success for us! The sharing of our failures creates a space for openness and vulnerability and leads to a great sense of connection within the team.
If you have experience with celebrating failures too, we’d love to hear about it! Or if you want to know more about our experience, feel free to contact us!
