Learning from Failure ..

Recently I asked some of my old colleagues who are in the pink of their career, and from great institutions, whether they had any failure in their lives. Most of them have moved from failure to failure, to rise up in their career but some of them have not had any failure and they are still holding on to their first job. I started the discussion by saying that I am now in the eighth job, enjoying all the while and have spent eight years on this eighth job. 

In my career so far of 34 years, I have changed jobs eight times  spent two years for my PG and five years at IIT Bombay pursuing a PhD. If I had stuck to my original job and had not moved out, I would not have met so many great Professors and learned people, great colleagues, would not have had so many great experiences, would not have learnt from it, would not have read and learnt new concepts, thought processes and would never have gone through so many enriching life experiences. 

The quote by Henry Ford , (at the right) one of modern industry's greatest doyens of the twentieth century, has a very level headed quote about failure. He says, Failure is nothing but a chance to begin afresh more intelligently.

I have had my share of failures in all these 34 years, and there has been a fair share of learning too. What has failures taught me ? To stay calm and cool, analyse the failures, learn from it and take the next step carefully trying to conquer still greater goals.

Bill Taylor in his article in HBR November 2017 (click here for the article, How Coca-cola, Netflix and Amazon learn from failures) speaks of how great companies view failures as stepping stones to success, why great companies need to make more mistakes and embrace more failures. 

Learning from failure involves two aspects - omission bias and loss aversion.

Omission bias - most of the employees feel that if they start something new and if it fails, the setback might damage thjeir career. So they tend to take it lying low, not willing to take chances.

Loss Aversion - always play to win, not to lose. These people feel, the pain of loss, is double the pleasure of winning and hence would never accept failure and do anything that might result in failure.

The casualty from both the above thought process is, unwillingness to try something new, experiment or innovate. These people are satisfied and happy to continue with their present lives and would not desire to ever topple it .

Quoting from the HBR paper, a couple of important points are listed here. 

• There is no learning without failures and no success without setbacks
• People who have failed and learnt from it are LESS FRAGILE, and more daring than those who expect perfection and flawless performance.
• If one is not prepared to fail, one is not prepared to learn. Unless people and organisations are prepared to fail and learn as fast as the world is changing, they will never keep growing and evolving. 

The most important point to stress here as is being done by Coca-cola, Netflix and Amazon, motivating their employees to come up with daring ideas. Experiment with them, put them into action, if it fails, learn from it, move forward and grow.

 If employees do not have to worry of failure and is able to learn from it, the organisation is nurturing a learning organisation, one that can survive the shocks of everyday life, innovate, grow and shine into the future for many decades.

George.