What do Youtube, Paypal, Slack, and Lego have in common? They all failed…until they found a pathway to success. Most entrepreneurs and companies spend years toiling in obscurity, testing and failing and testing and failing until they land on the perfect prototype. All the public see is the end result; they don’t see the experimentation, research, failed attempts, the trouble-shooting. 

It’s commonly understood that there is a lot to be learned from failing, but that’s easier said than done. On an individual level, there’s a lot of negative emotions and stigma attached to the experience and overcoming that is already a sizeable first hurdle. Within an organization, any given failure often requires someone to blame. This can have important repercussions on the culture of the workplace. In this article, we look at embracing change and demystifying the idea of ”failure” through the experience and expertise of Leadership experts, our Advisory Council, and our Fellows.

Unpacking Failure 

We can’t begin to analyze and embrace failure until we start to demystify it. In contemporary society, we’re constantly comparing ourselves to other people’s successes on social media, to a degree where when a project doesn’t work out as it’s intended to, we don’t know how to talk about it, let alone learn from it. The psychological weight of the shame and guilt people endure after an unsuccessful attempt can close them off from attempting anything at all. 

At beVisioneers, we’re privileged to have a community of experts on our Advisory Council and within our ecosystem who’ve truly mastered the art of turning setbacks into stepping stones. These professionals have faced failure head-on and emerged stronger, using it as a catalyst for growth. We had the opportunity to sit down with some of them to explore how they’ve redefined their relationship with failure and uncovered valuable lessons.

“We struggled to find our client because we were trying to be everything at once, not just in terms of the brand but as brand owners too. Then we learnt that delegation and letting go are two important lessons one should never forget as an entrepreneur. If you try to do everything yourself, you’re bound to fail at it all. On the other hand, if you’re trying to satisfy everybody, you’re going to end up failing in the business world.”

• Ruchika Bhat, Co-Founder KiRu, Member of the beVisioneers Advisory Council

Within a company context, this stigmatization of failure is manifested in the blame game. Leaders attribute the failure to one responsible person and as a result, create an environment where employees don’t feel psychological safety. Aaron Levy from Forbes, suggests this strategy of trying to avoid failure altogether is not effective ; ‘’Avoiding failure doesn’t actually decrease our chances of failure, it amplifies it. When organizations don’t allow and embrace failure, it only increases the absconding, secrecy and shame around failure—it doesn’t get rid of it.’’

50 Shades of ‘’Failure’’

A good first step to distancing ourselves to this reductive, harmful definition of failure (as merely the opposite of success) is to gain a more nuanced understanding of unexpected results. Amy C. Edmondson is a professor at Harvard Business School and has developed a helpful framework for analyzing failure. ‘’Although an infinite number of things can go wrong in organizations, mistakes fall into three broad categories: preventable, complexity-related, and intelligent’’. Looking deeper into Edmondson’s framework, it becomes clear that to fully understand and learn from one’s mistakes, a deep dive into how it came about, is required. 

It’s clear to see that within Edmondson’s spectrum of failure, there are mistakes and there is exploration, there are failures that are blameworthy and some that are praiseworthy. When analyzing results that didn’t go the way you wanted them to, it’s important to have a support system that allows you to reflect on the decisions that were made. Through this examination lessons can be learned; what would I do differently next time? How can I anticipate better in the future? How can I improve my process of quality control? 

“We are hands-on work people, so the first thing we did after we had the idea was to try it out! We didn’t wait to make any survey or interview. We got the material to grow it and we did our first prototypes in Manuela’s bathroom. From there on we made the procedure more accurate and iterated from the first prototype to refine our recipe. We love to dream and imagine because in that mental space we are free and anything can happen but only if I can try it out in the real world.“

• Marta Agueda Carlero, Cohort 1 Fellow

The Experimentation Culture 

The Fellows began their learning journey with the Dream phase, which culminated with the first milestone; defining their purpose-driven problem statement. They now have a clear understanding of the environmental problem they want to address and their values and purpose. Now they are moving to the Focus phase; they will test out their ideas, fail and try again. The final objective of this phase is to develop a minimum viable product; a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development. In this process, embracing failure as part of the learning and project development phase is crucial. We encourage Fellows to embrace setbacks and dead ends as a means to honing their ideas and establishing their own idea and pathway to success. 

By encouraging Fellows to experiment and test their way to a prototype, we want them to run their idea through designed failures; to tinker with it, to calibrate and improve it. We encourage Fellows to take a page out of the book of research scientists. They know that most of their experiments will fail but every failure delivers valuable information. These valuable insights will help you understand the need you’re addressing better, help you understand your audience better, and will help you to create a more unique offering. 

In one of our Live Sessions, we were blessed with the presence of special guest Shailesh Chitnis, Global Business Writer at The Economist. She suggested that we should be seeking to make mistakes, it should be part of our growth;  “If you are not embarrassed by your first MVP then you waited too long”. She encourages Fellows to build, adapt, build adapt, rather than waiting for perfection which is totally unrealistic for your first MVP.

“Working in startups, I’ve come to appreciate the experimentation culture a lot more. We are here to learn from our mistakes, take all that in and try again. It’s an infinite loop that can generate frustration at times but it can be very rewarding once something works. A dear friend once told me “you either win or learn, you can never fail.“

• Isabella Gomez Torres, Cohort 2 Fellow

You’ve tinkered and prototyped and have launched your product and it was a success. That means the experimenting is done right? Wrong. Experimentation is not just something that happens before success but should also be woven into the culture of a company or entrepreneur. A healthy approach to embracing change and learning from failure is part of a growth mindset. We are not striving for a fixed point but rather continuously striving to optimize, learn and improve. 

Starting Over But Never From Square One

What comes after making a mistake? Starting again, quitting, or pivoting. Learning from failure means you never start back at square one. You accumulate insights that you bring to your next endeavor. You also become more resilient to uncertainty and change, being able to distinguish which wrong turns are a result of lack of knowledge and which ones were out of your control. Don’t take it from us, here’s what CEO of Future Leaders Global, Tilmann Stolte had to say;

“To me failure is one of the most beautiful learning experiences. When ideas or projects don’t turn out the way I want them to I feel frustrated and sometimes even devastated. And then I remind myself that this is actually fantastic. Because: 1) it shows that I deeply care about my work, and 2) I get to learn something about myself or the problem I am trying to solve. 

I had moments where a product just didn’t work out, forcing our team to rethink fundamentals of our work, and ending on a new idea that was so exciting to all of us that it shifted the motivation in the team and eventually also success with our clients 10x. Failures are signals to dig deeper, both from a company perspective but also personally. And I got to really appreciate leaning into this with openness and curiosity.“

• Tilmann Stolte, CEO Future Leaders Global, Member of the beVisioneers Advisory Council