Failure and Learning

One of my favorite quotes comes from legendary auto entrepreneur Henry Ford. As a business owner, I appreciate it because it captures what our mistakesand failures really are: Opportunities.

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely."

We surveyed the 300 nonprofit leaders who comprise CEP’s Grantee Voice panel about some of the issues they face in performance management. In addition to the fact that most nonprofits do not receive any financial or non-monetary help for performance measurement, nonprofits also said that their funders are more interested in focusing on assessment information that is useful to foundations than information that would be helpful to nonprofits.

What keeps organizations from being more creative?    Fear, Narcissism, too many rules, and second guessing.   Now, how do change that? 

This is a great message and technique to incorporate into a session about letting failure go.   The video is short and worth listening to all of it, but if you are impatient skip to minute 7 and listen to the last five minutes.

Inner Voices:   We all have inner negative headsets that we learned as kids.   It boils down to: 

Don't Make A Mistake
Don't Make A Mistake

Then there is the "mistake" moment.   We cringe ....   Think of your last mistake -- personal or at work.     Feel what your body does -- the cringe, the shame.  What does it feel like.    That's what is stopping us from learning from mistakes or failure.

Our body gives in to the mistake.  It's like gumby doing the bidding.   I made a mistake!

No matter you learned this as a child - in school or whatever.    As an adult, it probably still haunts you.   It keeps you from being creative, stops us, but here is a technique to get past it:  The failure bow.

Coming to Terms With A Mistake So You Can Learn

Trapeze artists do it, improvisers, gymnists

Don't go into cringe mode, do this:

(1)   Raise hands to offer it up and let it go

(2)   Dumb ass grin like a dog being trained and uses submission

(3)   Say thank you I failed and move on

Don't walk into a meeting late and raise your hands and shout this, but you can do it under the table

If you incorporate the failure bow,  you are not glorifying failure - but rewarding the transparency, being accountable, being in the present, and paving the way to innovation.

Visuals to incorporate

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/galleries/72157632309133445/

Ninety percent of startups fail, and that includes startups that generate huge buzz in their early days. "[S]ome fail due to a lack of vision and others have terrible timing. Ultimately, there is a lack of foresight which might have saved their companies," says a spokesperson for Allmand Law, which analyzed successful and failed startups for an infographic included in this article.

Good definition of failure

Failure in the entrepreneurial vernacular is reframed as intentional iteration and experimentation.  It’s not failure in the catastrophic sense.  Failure is simply a portfolio of setbacks, false starts, wrong turns, and mistakes that are expected and tolerated because the entrepreneur purposefully iterates in order to gather new, relevant, and timely information.  Through iteration entrepreneurs seek not to kill an idea but to make it better, and this happens through an anticipated cycle of pivoting and adapting.

Don't use the F word, simply pressing and unimportant.

The importance of learning how to "pivot" in the face of failure

Great piece!