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Just as pain is necessary for health, failure is necessary for growth and success.

It is common for companies to run into challenges and obstacles that are difficult to foresee and overcome. In today’s global environment it can sometimes be difficult to see troubled times ahead. Businesses are inherently engaged in a process of providing a product or service where there are known and unknown risks and it is anticipated or at least hoped, that the rewards for success far outweigh those risks.

So given the pace of change and the multiplicative effect of change, speed and complexity, it is to be expected that there are and will continue to be, lots of future risks and thus lots of failures. But just as pain provides the stimulus that leads to self preservation, failure plays the same role as we try to take the failures as learning moments and share it with others such that the future behavior is influenced and we make better decisions next time. Applied Learning is a term that has been recently used to capture that concept and one definition is the art of taking an experience and internalizing it such that there is a change in future behavior.

I remember a poster that an employee of mine had in her office in the 80’s, it read :

“Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment”.

To a large extent we are all judged or have our competencies assessed by the judgments we make. It is also true that the degree to which we are viewed to be successful is very much linked to the results we achieve based on those judgments that we make. Those that encounter difficult times and fail, whether it be a big or small failure and that look upon them as opportunities to learn such that they will never make that mistake again, are more likely to succeed in the future.

Those that do not look at failure from that perspective are prone to become paralyzed and thus progress stalls.

It is an age old wisdom that we are not defined by our challenges or failures, but rather by our response to them.  That however takes courage and it generally needs a special kind of work environment for people to feel that they are free and encouraged in certain circumstances to try, and be let fail from time to time.  A business that wants to be known for creativity, innovation and having a culture that is able to adapt and change as business conditions shift, must have this kind of environment. I contend that a company with this type of environment would be a magnet for progressive, ambitious people that are committed to bringing their talents and offerings to the world. It really is exciting to imagine a company that could actually create these optimal conditions, balanced with a strong purpose and good set of management systems and principles. I believe they would have a high likelihood of great success and would be hard to compete against.

So remember that at the end of the day it’s OK to fail as long as you learn from it, in fact it might be the answer for your own personal growth and that of your companies. !

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