The fail fast mindset is ubiquitous in today’s society. The idea of failing fast, failing often, and pivoting often has been a very popular mantra in the business world since the last financial crisis in 2008. Its main purpose is to minimize the psychological and financial impact of losing. Keep failing fast and pivoting until it stops happening. Hopefully, you’ll gain enough momentum before your resources and energy run out from failure. Why is the fail fast and fail often mindset still the de facto formula for success in today’s world?
Maybe for those with deep pockets, taking a bold step and being prepared to fail can be a fun adventure. Most of us can’t afford to fail once, much less multiple times. If we take a chance and it fails, we don’t have the luxury or resources to pivot and try again and again until we succeed.
Feel-good failure strategies
As many of my friends in top leadership roles at some of the world’s largest companies often say, “When we faced this crisis, failing fast, let alone failing at all, was not an option.” And yet the leading management consultants on our Advisory Board continue to insist that the only way to innovate and succeed in this new world is to celebrate failure and make failing fast a desirable goal.
When your reputation as a leader and the livelihoods of those who depend on you are at stake, failure is not the outcome we should expect, no matter how fast or how often it happens. For those of us who grew up failing unintentionally and often, now that we’ve had a taste of some success and stability, we know that failing fast and failing often on purpose isn’t so cool.
So why are so many smart people around the world today embarking on missions with the goal of failing fast?
We all fear loss, pain, and embarrassment. Humans don’t want to experience those emotions. Ironically, these are the very same emotions associated with failure. One way to avoid the pain of failure is to avoid risky actions that lead to negative outcomes. But leaders must lead their organizations into the future. The future is always unknown and inherently risky. Thus, leaders have no choice but to take risks. As a shortcut to this, leaders have been taught to hack their minds into believing that failure is a good thing. By setting failure as a goal, they are protecting themselves from feeling all the pain that comes after the inevitable failure.
Some people take failure to the next level and actually celebrate it. This has been around in the business world for over a decade and has become incredibly popular because it’s a really feel-good strategy.
Failure hurts. It hurts even more if you don’t learn from it.
I have used the fail-fast technique for many years, in my personal and professional life, on dozens of important projects. I used to believe in it very fervently. But I eventually came to the conclusion that the fail-fast technique is not effective because it gives a false sense of progress and can lead to huge losses in the long term without you realizing it. Just like alcohol and drugs numb people’s pain, celebrating failure suppresses the real problem. This is a huge mistake and I believe it is the root cause of many of the problems in society today. Because when you start a journey prepared to fail, your first instinct is to accept the obstacle as a failure and either give up immediately or rush and redirect to the next idea. As a result, you never get as far as you need to go to experience a breakthrough.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying failure isn’t important. I am just emphasizing that you shouldn’t expect failure when starting any journey. Learning deeply and quickly from failure is crucial to growing into your next better self.
Failure is painful, but it’s even more painful if you don’t learn and grow from it.
Failure should not be celebrated because if you associate positive emotions with it, you will not learn from it. You should aim and plan everything to be successful, but when you fail, you should take the time to feel the pain and accept it. You need to experience the emotional pain of failure and ask yourself what you can learn from it. What could you have done better to do better next time?
It is important to experience the pain of failure, learn deeply from it and find a way to break through to the next level, so you will become stronger, wiser and grow faster.
From the book Fail Fast?: 10 Tips to Succeed Faster {Innovation Done Right} By Luv Tulsidas. Copyright © 2024 Luv Tulsidas. Used by permission of Forbes Books, Charleston, South Carolina.
