Failure Is Not A Cause For Celebration

May 23, 2014

by kings 

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Tolerating failure is enough. It doesn't need to be celebrated.
When I fail, I don't want to stop and celebrate. I want to figure out where I went wrong so I don't repeat the error, then move on quickly to the next thing, which might just be a big win.
Then we can stop and toast.
A comment from Marc Andreessen caught my eye earlier this week.

Silicon Valley trend: celebrating failure. 'I've always thought failure sucks.'

I agree with Andreessen. Failure sucks.
This trend goes far beyond Silicon Valley. In working with big companies to bring their innovation practices up to speed, will often work to combat the belief that in order to innovate, companies need to start "celebrating failure" to incentivize employees.
Yes, it's important to have the freedom to fail, because without that freedom everybody makes safe bets and there are no big payoffs. Freedom to fail and celebrating failure, however, are two very different things.
Understanding Risk Is the First Step
Most big companies aren't used to taking risks, so they aren't good at assessing high and low risk behavior. The first step in a culture that wants to tolerate failure is risk assessment. Some revenue streams are too high value to jeopardize. Some information is too sensitive for playing fast and loose. Some relationships are too important for experimentation.
Those areas need to be protected as the culture shifts toward tolerating failure. Determining which areas are fair game for the sandbox is important, or the result might be a total disaster for the company while an employee expects to be rewarded for an epic failure.
Focus on Business Value
David Ogilvy once said, "In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create." Before I dive into this one, I should confess that in my perfect world, I'd be in Italy for the next six months writing a novel and swimming at twilight in the Tyrrhenian Sea while the last of the sun turns the coastal marble to molten gold. Like many of you, I place an extremely high value on creative work for the sheer pleasure of having an imagination and being able to use it to express something unique about what it means to be alive in a mysterious cosmos.
The reality, however, is that companies pay employees to provide business value, period. Your boss isn't required to make sure that the side of you that loves creativity for the sheer pleasure of the act is satisfied during business hours. The best kind of creativity at work is the kind that the company can sell. If you don't want to see your company sell more of whatever it's in the business of selling, you're in the wrong place. The trick is to align your creativity with the business you're in, which sounds much simpler than it is.
Our brains tend to think in a linear fashion. We think of the next thing, or the thing adjacent to the things we're already thinking about, instead of really going the distance and imagining the future and then tracing it back to where we are now. Sometimes in doing this, we'll be too far ahead of the game, or too far behind without realizing it. Sometimes, we will fail and it will cost money. But things are getting cheaper and faster, and failing in this way is less painful than it was.
Celebrating a failure is like giving the losing team a trophy along with the winning team. It takes all of the victory out of a win, and creates the inability to distinguish one from the other. It promotes the kind of attitude that enables people to feel like an idea is enough just because people think it's interesting. What's interesting is when a person, or a team, is able to back a vision up with the tedium of creativity, the countless tiny steps that make the very unglamorous grind to the finish line a true success. This rare and fantastic event is a cause for celebration.
Failures that result from a thoughtful process of risk assessment and a bold attempt to try something new without jeopardizing an organization's ability to function shouldn't be penalized. But they shouldn't be celebrated, either.