Two Years of Failure
A little over two years ago, my assistant and I snuck into the office after hours and painted quotes of famous people’s thoughts about failure, from Winston Churchill (“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”) to Sofia Loren (“Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life"). After my assistant left, I took a Sharpie marker and wrote some of my most humbling failures on the wall.
The wall was met with a mixture of excitement and apprehension, both by employees and by the press who quickly caught wind of it. Over time, employees, partners, even family members came by to add their remarks until the wall was littered with failures. It was received favorably by the LA Times and NPR’s Here and Now, where they even started their own online Failure Walls; perhaps not quite so favorably on HuffPost Live, where my fellow panelists were more wary of the idea. Despite mixed reviews, the Failure Wall has persevered.
So what have we learned, two years in?
1. Culture change starts small.
At first, there was only one group of failures written on the wall: mine. It took a couple days before someone else picked up a marker. After a half dozen brave souls had written down failures, they started coming in faster… the growth was exponential rather than linear. As employees began to feel safe in admitting mistakes, the wall filled up. Now the wall is completely covered, and space becomes available only when an old failure fades away. Which brings me to #2…
2. Old failures disappear.
I may need to speak to customer service at Sharpie, because it turns out that the word “permanent” is misleading. We’ve noticed that writing on the wall tends to last a few months before it starts to fade, and then by about nine months it has completely disappeared, making space for the next round. This physical property of the Failure Wall mimics how failure works in the mind: as long as you acknowledge failure, it slips away both in your own memory and in the memories of those around you. Unacknowledged, it tends to fester. Getting it out is the only way to go.
3. Failure is, really, no big deal.
For the first few weeks, employees would diligently check the failure wall for new entries each morning while sipping their coffee. Now, only new employees or visitors to the office spend any significant time reading. For the rest of us, it’s just part of the scenery. Failures happen, we write them down, they fade away. You chuckle at some of the more humorous ones (“I thought it was spelled ‘fale.’“), and maybe your jaw drops at some of the more serious ones (“Waited months for someone to tell me what to do instead of taking the initiative…”). But ultimately, it’s just not a big deal. Employees have fessed up to mistakes that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, and no one has gotten in trouble. As a CEO, I know it’s not the failure wall mistakes that I should be concerned about, even if they are costly. If it’s on the failure wall, the writer has acknowledged it, learned from it, and is unlikely to repeat it.
The idea of failure is often the elephant in the room that no one wants to mention. The Failure Wall has given us a way to talk about failure without stigmatizing it. When someone brings up a risky proposition in a meeting, inevitably someone quips that it “could end up on the failure wall.” Thus acknowledged, it frees us to have a frank discussion and calculate the risk.
4. Failure is, really, a big deal.
Acknowledging and accepting failure is a fundamental part of how businesses operate. In our case, it has ironically enabled our ability to grow and innovate quickly. I’m proud to say we have a culture that accepts, embraces, and occasionally chuckles at failure.
While my team and I have written many failures on the wall, the Wall itself is one of our favorite successes.
Photo: Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp.
Be sure to check out the other articles in the failure series:
Retired - Sales And Marketing Specialist at CTHPlans.com
7yEnjoyed the insight, thank you
Cloud Native Platforms, Data Analytics,Redhat Application Foundations, AI/ML
8yInspiring thoughts
Trying to avoid failure, unlike resistance, is futile. Especially in IT. My policy is to admit my errors early, and often. A side benefit is, those times you say, "nope, not my fault," people tend to believe you....
Director of SIMIODE- Systemic Initiative for Modeling Investigations and Opportunities with Differential Equations
8y"If at first you don't succeed. . . " could be because you were afraid to start in the first place. So start and let failures guide you and success move you forward.