Failure to Fail

There’s a time-honored assumption that people learn best from their mistakes, but it’s not always true. Psychological research shows that people often incorporate learning more deeply and durably from getting something right than from getting it wrong. That’s because people hate failure. We experience shame and embarrassment when we fail, and we go to great lengths not to dwell on our mistakes.

It’s not that mistakes have less to teach us--it’s that our tolerance for examining them is much lower than for basking in our success. And without curiosity and self-examination, there can be no learning. 

In order to capture the vast potential growth that could come from our mistakes, we have to reframe them. Maybe we should banish the words “success” and “failure” altogether. Maybe we should just talk about “reinforcing signals” and “change signals.” Does the data tell us to do more of something or less of it? Information isn’t positive or negative, it’s just information.

All of that is easier said than done. We all hate getting things wrong, especially if we’ve spent a lifetime trying to prove ourselves by getting things right. To change this attitude throughout an organization is a heavy lift. But unless we change our attitudes about success and failure across the culture, we have little chance of success. The driving force behind shame is the threat of ostracism. It’s a social disease, and it’s rooted in group ethic. 

Show me a culture and a leadership team that celebrates mistakes, and I’ll show you an organization that gets better at what it does everyday.