How to Embrace Failure & Learn from Mistakes
James 1:2-4 "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance."
The process of building a business isn't always easy and it's inevitable that many mistakes will be made along the way. Rather than giving up at the first sign of failure, however, seeing these mistakes and failures as valuable lessons can transform them into stepping stones toward the business's eventual success.
Trials in life that challenge one's faith tend to lead to growth (however painful) and strengthen both your faith and your resolve. Interestingly, "good times," in contrast, tend to lead to complacency. The same goes for trials in a business. Embracing failures and learning from mistakes will make your business—and your faith—stronger.
It's Essential to Embrace Failure in Business
There are a host of reasons to accept failure in business—some of which we've hinted at above:
Builds perseverance: Accepting and working through failures (rather than giving up) builds perseverance, which is a crucial trait for successful entrepreneurs. There will inevitably be trials and challenges in the life of a business, and persevering through early failures will prepare you to be able to confidently persevere through greater challenges in the future.
Builds resilience: Failing takes an emotional toll. Seeing a perceived failure as a valuable learning opportunity rather than "the end of the world" makes it easier to get back up, dust yourself off, and persevere with dignity and confidence rather than becoming trapped in humiliation and shame.
Builds wisdom: The lessons we've learned the hard way tend to be those we remember the best. Early small failures build wisdom for taking calculated risks with more significant resources (larger budgets, geographical reach, or scale of production) down the road.
Encourages innovation: People who are afraid to fail may avoid taking on challenging tasks and are unlikely to suggest new ideas to management. A culture of embracing failure provides the required psychological safety for experimentation and innovation to thrive.
Makes you more self-aware: Self-reflection after a failure can help you identify your weaknesses and the areas you need to improve. For example, a weakness in the area of cash flow management could lead to a loss rather than a profit at the end of the month. Identifying the problem at that point enables you to tighten up your processes and prevent much larger losses over time.
Cultivates empathy: Everyone fails sometimes. Business owners and managers who experience failure themselves are much more likely to be empathic and supportive toward their employees rather than criticizing them, disciplining them harshly, or dismissing them when they fail.
Strategies for Learning from Mistakes in Business
Learning from mistakes and growing through challenges depends on reflection and analysis. A test of your faith will only make you grow if you pause to seek God's perspective on the situation (through prayer, Bible study, and consultation with mature believers) and work on the weaknesses that the test brings to light. Similarly, you will only grow from a business setback by taking the time to reflect on and analyze what has happened and refine the relevant business concepts and strategies to prevent the same failures from happening again.
The following practical strategies will help you derive the maximum benefit from business failures, setbacks, and mistakes.
#1: Cultivate an Organizational Culture of Learning
Businesses that learn the most from failures and past mistakes are those that:
Detect failures
Analyze them thoroughly
Design experiments to help them find the best solutions to the issues that were uncovered through the failure
The first step—detecting failures—is difficult in businesses that are quick to cast blame and punish deviations from spec because employees are more likely to hide small problems and mistakes if they don't think these mistakes will ultimately affect anyone (the issue is that they often do).
However, the reality is that mistakes are often inevitable due to the complexity of modern work. Cultivating a learning culture by encouraging employees enthusiastically to report on small mistakes, failures, and uncertainties as soon as they arise—and using this feedback to analyze and improve your protocols—will help you prevent much larger problems from developing over time.
#2: Identify the Underlying Reason for Each Failure
All failures in the workplace fall into three broad categories, which can be considered on a spectrum between intentional deviation (blameworthy failures) and thoughtful experimentation (praiseworthy failures). These categories are based on the work of Amy C. Edmondson:
Preventable failures: A team member in a predictable operation—such as manufacturing or accounting—deviates from the standard procedure in a routine job. This may be due to laziness, distraction, tiredness, or another cause. The solution is often a combination of timely communication, support, targeted training if required, and disciplinary action if lesser measures are ineffective.
Unavoidable failures: A failure occurs when a team member encounters a unique situation in a complex system and the strategy he or she tries doesn't work particularly well. These kinds of failures are unavoidable but can be analyzed and used (via experimentation) to develop new, more effective protocols.
Intelligent failures: Team members thoughtfully test a new idea for the purposes of R&D (on a small scale) and an idea fails. This is a praiseworthy kind of failure and an area in which risk-taking should be proactively encouraged.
#3: Create Opportunities for Small, Early Failures
The key to embracing failure without the negative consequences sinking your business is to create opportunities for small, early failures. The form these opportunities and experiments take will depend on whether your business is engaged in routine, complex, or frontier tasks or a combination of all three.
For example:
Routine tasks: A new employee can be given sample tasks to work on under the supervision of a more experienced employee (who is responsible for the final quality of the task). The new employee is encouraged to ask as many questions as possible and report on failures during the training period so that all of his or her uncertainties are adequately addressed. The new employee is then transferred to moderate and then high-stakes tasks only once they have shown they are capable of handling them.
Complex tasks: A professional, such as a teacher or doctor, can be given some leeway by management to try new strategies for solving certain problems they encounter in the course of their work. The professional would be responsible for reporting on the strategies used (together with the results) as soon as possible after the event to determine whether the strategy should be avoided or employed on a larger scale.
Frontier exploration: Certain team members can be provided with resources to conduct surveys, perform experiments, and try out new ideas on a small scale. This could look like:
Conducting customer and industry surveys
Product development and subsequent testing in a lab or with a focus group
Offering "trial" products and services that are provided for a limited time to gather feedback and see how successful they are before integrating the product or service permanently
#4: Celebrate Learning, Improvement, and Growth
It's essential to take the time to celebrate the learning that has taken place, the ways in which each team member has improved, and the growth that has resulted from embracing failure and learning from mistakes. There is a good reason that James counsels his readers to “consider it pure joy” when they face trials of many kinds. The benefits of growing effectively through trials are invaluable!
Recognizing and appreciating the fruits of learning from failure affirms the efforts of your team members, managers, and top-level executives. Ultimately, it motivates them to continue to accept and analyze failures and persevere through setbacks when they occur in the future.
Learn from Setbacks & Persevere
Setbacks, failures, and mistakes in life and business are inevitable. However, how you respond to them will determine whether the trials make your faith and business strategy stronger or figuratively sink the ship. We provide practical wisdom about learning from mistakes and many other practical topics on our podcast (sign up for an insider glimpse) and as part of our membership plans (request more information here).
The early Christians to whom James was writing had their faith challenged and tested, and we all know that the movement not only survived but grew to fill the whole Earth. Look at failures and setbacks in your business the same way: What could look like failure right now could hold the key that ultimately propels your business to success.
Related Verses
Proverbs 24:16