NatWest Business Builder: Building a growth mindset
The Museum of Failure in Los Angeles. © Getty Images
Failure is an inevitable part of life. It’s also an inevitable part of business. It happens to everyone, at all levels, in all companies. Despite this, many businesses are afraid of failure and the stigma attached to it. And because no one enjoys admitting that they’ve made mistakes, it’s an uncomfortable feeling that, for some, quickly becomes shameful and even scary.
Organisational psychologist Samuel West believes that we need to change our relationship with failure, which is why he opened the Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, Sweden, and Los Angeles last year. On display are a variety of failed innovations and corporate misfires, such as the Betamax video cassette, a range of BIC pens designed exclusively for women (called ‘For Her’), an eau de toilette fragrance from macho motorbike company Harley-Davidson, Coca-Cola BlāK (a combination of coffee and Coca-Cola) and, more recently, Google Glass. These very different products have a common denominator: when they came to market, they all failed with the public.
Failure leads to innovation
West admits that he wanted the artefacts in the museum to be fun and interesting. “Who thought developing pens ‘for women’ was a good idea?” he asks – but insists that he isn’t holding them up to ridicule for the sake of it. “I’m not recommending failure,” he says. “But the message of the museum is that we have to accept failure if we want innovation or progress in any domain of life. We also have to be better at learning from failure. So while I don’t glorify it, I do think we should be less fearful of it.”
Naturally, some companies are better than others at dealing with failure. Jeff Bezos from Amazon, for example, once wrote: “I believe we are the best place in the world to fail (we have plenty of practice!), and failure and invention are inseparable twins.”
West is impressed by this ethos. “That’s a genuine approach to business,” he says. “Failure is never going to be a positive experience, but the point is it shouldn’t be so negative that it dictates our behaviour.”
The Church of Fail
Matthew Matheson is positively evangelical about the negative experience of failure. Before setting up his own business, he worked as operations manager for NixonMcInnes, a social media consultancy based in Brighton that has since been retired. During his time at the company, Matheson devised a staff initiative called the Church of Fail where employees would stand on a stage in front of their colleagues and answer three questions: ‘What did I fail at?’ ‘How did I cope with it?’ and ‘What would I do differently next time?’ For their honesty they would receive a wild round of applause – and were not allowed to leave the stage until that applause had ended.
“The result was a peculiar feeling of praise and vulnerability,” says Matheson. “From a wider perspective, it made it OK to have a conversation about failure in that space, first and foremost; but then, as the practice was repeated, it began to filter out into daily life. Making the conversation engaging and fun was a way to normalise it.”
Breaking the system
The Church of Fail wasn’t congratulating failure, says Matheson, because that would only lower quality standards. “Instead it was about accepting that failure happens and that we should be more supportive of the people who are going through it,” he says. “It was about creating a culture where people were able to speak up about it, share what they’d learned from it, and then put those learnings into action so they didn’t get hidden away.”
“If you’re dealing with new problems, it shows you’re trying something new, something you may not be an expert at yet. You can only learn by having a go”
Chloe Watmore, MD, Thermotex
Chloe Watmore, multi-award-winning MD of Chesterfield-based Thermotex Engineering, has an original attitude to failure. “If we get something wrong – something we thought our system was strong enough to cope with – we say: ‘Hooray! We’ve broken the system!’ Because then we get an opportunity to fix it, learn from it and move forward.”
Of course, if a business is always dealing with the same problems, it’s plainly not learning from them, says Watmore. “But if you’re dealing with new problems, at least it shows you’re trying something new, something you may not be an expert at yet. You can only learn by having a go. One of my university lecturers said: ‘Profit is the reward for risk-taking.’ That’s so true. You can’t expect to be a super-successful entrepreneur or business without breaking a few eggs.”
A spirit of creativity
The bottom line is that companies won’t be able to engender a spirit of creativity if their employees aren’t allowed to make mistakes. Tim Leigh is marketing director at Stage One, a creative construction and manufacture company near York which makes bespoke elements for architects, producers and creative directors the world over.
It was Stage One that built the Olympic copper ‘petal’ cauldron for the London 2012 Olympics, which won praise from viewers around the world. It was also behind the ‘snowflakes’ at the opening ceremony of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics that morphed into the five Olympic rings – although, famously, one failed to open. It’s never enjoyable when something like that happens, especially in a live setting watched by millions, says Leigh; but, sometimes, it’s simply unavoidable. So you have to get over it.
“We have to embrace the fact that, on occasion, things will go wrong,” he says. “As long as no one is injured, do you know what? That’s OK, that’s bearable. It’s not ideal; but not being afraid of failure allows us to do brave and creative things. If we were petrified of failure, we would never do anything extraordinary.”
