In a recent article from the Harvard Business Review on ideas to beat the New Year doldrums, one of the headlines sparked an interesting conversation here at OWB HQ: Fail-fast February.
The idea is that to achieve the ‘best’ results, we first must fail spectacularly and quickly, and that your final product or strategy may well be wildly different from the starting point because of those failures.
It’s obvious that the end goal is success, but re-framing how we see ‘failure’ to think of it as better than success is key.
- Failure is a redirection: it gives us a heads-up that we’re heading to the wrong place with a project.
- Failure is an opportunity: it’s a chance to come back with a stronger, more reasoned solution to our initial problem.
- Failure is not fatal: for most of us, failure means getting to try again – giving up shouldn’t be an option.
Take Michael Jordan for example, arguably the world’s best basketball player. What you might not know is that in high school he was cut from the basketball team: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
A growth mindset is the key to maximising potential, across all aspects of your professional life. If your goal is to develop your staff, try giving them tasks above their ability. It may take longer than the tasks they’re used to doing, and you’ll expect them to make mistakes along the way, but you know they can do it!
Want to increase your own performance? Set high goals with a lower chance of success… If (or rather, when) you fail, figure out what you should have done differently and go again. As the old axiom goes – practise really does make perfect (according to recent studies, around 10,000 hours of practise to be precise!).
Senior leaders – have you ever spoken to your team about your own most disastrous professional failures, and what you have learned from them? Take this as your sign that sharing your ‘Fail-fast February’ story might be just the thing your team needs to spark inspiration and a different way of thinking this month!
