Learning from BAM Failure: Failure is Not the Enemy
by Chris Cloud
We’ve been focused on ‘maximizing BAM success factors‘ recently on The BAM Review blog. However, we believe that ‘utilizing BAM failure’ is just as important – we can learn a lot about success from failure. Business consultant and guest author Chris Cloud introduces this new series on Learning from BAM Failure.
Failure is Not the Enemy
If there’s one thing we know, it’s that we’re going to fail at something.
There’s massive, catastrophic failure, and then there’s micro-failure. People fail classes, fail at sports, fail at dating relationships. There’s ministry failure. There’s failure to live up to our values.
Failure might be small, like a bad kick of the ball when the net was wide open, or it might be as big as going out of business. Sometimes business relationships fail. Sometimes a product launch fails, or your great idea never gets off the ground. Failure is all around us, and it’s definitely a part of life.
There’s a tendency, especially in business, to think of failure as the enemy.
But what if we looked at failure a different way? What if saw it as a necessary element of the growth process?
Choose Your Failure-related Goal
Facebook’s motto during their early days was “move fast and break things.”
As a startup, they knew they had to innovate quickly, and a necessary component of rapid innovation is a high likelihood of failure. They knew they were going to break things. But even when things broke, they knew they didn’t want to be paralyzed by failure, or the fear of failure. They wanted to get up quickly when they hit the dirt, wanted to learn from it, and keep moving onto the next thing.
I’ve been a lifelong snowboarder. As I’ve got ready to hit the slopes around the world, I’ve often overheard beginners brag to each other. They’ll say something like, “I went out yesterday and didn’t fall even once!”
Some people’s goal is not to fall.
If you know anything about skiing or snowboarding though, it’s not that hard to get to ‘not falling’. What’s really hard is to get better, to do increasingly technical things like jumps, tricks, and advanced techniques on various types of challenging terrain.
These folks who simply are trying to avoid falling will never be great at the sport. They’ll just be great at not falling.
I’ve snowboarded with Olympic gold and silver medalists, and guess what? They fall all the time. It’s not because they aren’t any good, but because they are constantly pushing the envelope and trying things that they’ve never done before. Things that are extremely difficult.
Falling is a natural byproduct of progress, and Olympians know that. They don’t see failure as failure. They see it as growth.
It’s not hard to “not fail” if we set the bar low.
Embrace Failure
If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake. – Frank Wilczek, 2004 Nobel Prize winner
Sometimes in ministry-related ventures, we tend to have the wrong view about failure.
What would happen to our ministries if we stopped being afraid of failure, but instead chose to be afraid of stagnation and ‘low bar’ plateaus? What if we saw failure instead as a necessary component of progress?
I’ve seen people fall off both sides of the wagon on this issue.
Some folks have no concern for failure at all, and as a result they live in a constant state of failing. This is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about an approach to failure that leads to progress, to forward momentum.
But the other unhelpful reaction can be a complete aversion to failure, an unhealthy fear of it. This is also unhealthy, and can lead to a dangerous paralysis.
I’m not glorifying failure. But I believe we can all use a mental shift. Let’s fail fast, and fail forward. Don’t let the fear of future failure, or the over-analysis of past failure keep you from moving forward. You’ll be better for it.
Success is going from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill
In the next few articles, we are going to explore various components of failure as well as specific examples from people who have failed in small and big ways and what they have learned on the journey.
Resources for Further Reading and Study
- Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin (Book)
- Keep a Resume of your Failures by Adam Grant, Wharton Professor (Article)
- Stop Saying Sorry and Say Thank You Instead by Yao Xiao (Comics with a message)
Chris Cloud is an entrepreneur who has been living and working with his wife in Nepal over the past 3 years. He is passionate about helping companies and individuals identify their perceived growth ceiling, and break past that ceiling. He is partner at a firm in the U.S., ALIGN. ALIGN helps leadership teams clarify their “true north” and gain traction by aligning every aspect of the organization to that vision. He holds a degree in business administration, but counts his 12+ years of starting or serving in a series of fast-growing startups as his real entrepreneurial education!
On a good day, you’ll find Chris running up a mountain or snowboarding down one. You can connect with him here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ccloud/
