Fail Forward, Spring Back?
WMMM #056 - This week, I share a perspective on failure, backed by science.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter March 2, 2024 4 min read
Got your attention?
Shamelessly, I used a play on words with the Daylight Saving Time reminder to get your attention.
The saying is not “fail or fall forward and spring back.”
It’s “spring forward and fall back” for setting your clocks forward one hour at 2:00a next Sunday, March 10, 2024.
If anyone mistakenly sets their clocks back 1 hour next Sunday because they only read my title, I may have failed.
But let’s talk about failing forward.
Can we agree that sales is an imprecise profession?
How often do things go awry?
Is it a failure when that happens?
Our society is very animosity-driven.
We tend to pick sides.
When an outcome falls short, the typical reaction is to find a culprit.
Assign blame.
Discipline, retrain, shame, and blame.
But there is a way to think of failure more systematically.
Dr. Amy Edmondson thinks so.
The Harvard Business School Professor elaborates in her book: “The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.”
Blameworthy or Praiseworthy?
Remove Blame.
Make our responses less uniform.
Dr. Edmondson proposes that we have a spectrum of causes of failures.
On one end of the spectrum is Blameworthy.
An example is sabotage.
Someone literally tanked.
They threw a wrench into the process.
Punish the saboteur.
On the other end is Praiseworthy.
Think of hypothesizing.
Someone (scientist or engineer) makes a miscalculation attempting to solve a significant problem, and it fails.
Praise the scientist.
Think of a complex sales cycle.
There is no road map with step-by-step instructions that ensures success.
That does not exist.
So when something goes wrong, and we receive an undesirable result, what typically happens?
Blame game.
Shame and Blame.
Let’s look at Dr. Edmiondson’s spectrum and see if it informs us how we might react better.
The Failure Spectrum
The spectrum contains six causes (1-6) for failure, starting with the Blame extreme at #1 and ending with the Praiseworthy extreme at #6.
-1- Sabotage or Deviance - the individual chooses to violate a prescribed process or practice.
The intent has to be to break something.
It’s not a mistake, and it’s not a thoughtful experiment.
The individual is to blame.
Inattention
-2- Inattention - Inattention is when something goes wrong because you were mailing it in.
Examples include you did not hear what someone said and didn’t ask, then improvised an attempt to do something.
Inattention isn’t always blameworthy.
What if a nurse is working a double shift?
Is it their fault if someone didn’t show up for their shift or the nurse’s manager scheduled a double shift?
Fatigue is the cause of that nurse not fully paying attention.
Inattention was blameworthy in the Hyatt Regency atrium collapse in Kansas City in the early eighties.
The builder publicly chose to swap one long beam for two smaller connected steel beams, and the engineer-on-record failed to make a five-minute calculation that would have shown the load was too great to allow the change.
The reason for allowing the change was money; it was a shorter path to completing the job.
Inability
-3- Inability - The individual lacks the knowledge, attitudes, skills, or perceptions to execute a task.
Something that we did and failed because we didn’t have the ability to complete to success, but typically can develop that ability that we lack.
Peter Principle: One gets promoted to a position higher than they are capable of, based on their past experience.
However, their past experience may not have been so relevant.
Task Challenge
-4- Task Challenge - the task is too challenging for reliable, failure-free performance.
An example is an Olympic gymnast, training all the time and able to accomplish some of the most challenging maneuvers but will not and can not successfully execute them 100% of the time.
With a gold medal at stake in competition, the gymnast must attempt and accomplish the most difficult to win.
If they do not execute perfectly, they will not win and may fall out of medal contention altogether.
They could opt to lower their sights, attempting only maneuvers with less difficulty and a lower risk of failure.
And, if they execute those lower-risk maneuvers flawlessly, they will be in contention for 3rd place, a bronze medal.
But most Olympic athletes are wired differently.
They compete to be the best.
They go for the gold.
In the world of sales, there is no medal for second or third place.
We either win or lose.
In a complex sales cycle, there are literally hundreds of little moments.
We can not and will not execute each of those moments flawlessly.
We will have moments of failure.
But unlike the Olympic gymnast, whose failure is viewed as praiseworthy, sometimes even heroic, all too often in the corporate world, this type of failure is not seen as a good thing.
We are inaccurately judged and sometimes punished by those who, given the proper training, experience, and understanding, might view these failures as praiseworthy.
When we are fortunate enough to work in a sales culture, our perseverance through these hundreds of moments is viewed as praiseworthy.
Uncertainty
-5- Uncertainty - You have an idea for a strategic shift or product you could launch.
There are excellent reasons to believe this could work.
But it’s not 100 percent.
Experimentation
-6- Experimentation - The most obvious example is a scientist in a lab who really believes it will work and combines the chemicals, and it fails.
This is a praiseworthy failure.
Thinking about failure this way is a more helpful approach.
It may help us eliminate the fear of failure.
Thank you for reading.
Jeff
When you think “sales leader,” I hope you think of me.
If you like what you read, please share this with a friend.
I offer my help to sales leaders and their teams.
I possess the skills identified in this article and share them as part of my service.
In my weekly newsletter, Win More, Make More, I provide tips, techniques, best practices, and real-life stories to help you improve your craft.
