Fail to plan, plan to fail and PLAN TO FAIL!

So how does failure go from a necessary and positive practice required in order to learn and progress when we are children to professional suicide as an adult?

Well, we go to school and enter into the academic main stream whereby we learn that from that point onwards we are going to be judged; judged on our progress, our ability, our success.  We are set targets and we are given expectations for our performance and not achieving these targets, we are labelled as failures who are under achieving, unsatisfactory or inadequate when compared with our peers. 

Those of you with children will know that this is even worse for pupils today; there are curricula now set from nursery school so we begin assessing the ability of our babies as well as our children nowadays!  Society places a huge emphasis on the merit and importance of certificates that represent academic achievement and ability and we are told that without these remarkable pieces of paper, our opportunities to achieve success are greatly inhibited, if not withdrawn entirely.

So we leave school and take our new learned fear of failure into business.  We become risk averse and do all we can to avoid risk.  We have learned to play it safe and this can severely stunt the growth of our business. If we never take any risks, we can never enjoy the learning that accompanies a win or failure, we inhibit our own and businesses’ ability to grow.  A business can never outgrow its leader and if that leader is impeded by a crippling fear of failure, then they and their business will remain in a limbo of mediocrity.  

There is a clear a definite need for us as business owners to reframe failure.  There is a saying we often use in our planning workshops; “Fail to plan and you plan to fail,” but this needs to be extended even more; we should also be planning to fail occasionally because to be successful in business we need to fail more and learning from those failures.  It is said that we learn twice as much from failure as we do from success and that’s the kind of progress we could all do with making.

For more on this and other ideas on how you can turn even the greatest ‘failures’ into successes, read the next instalment of this week’s blog on Tuesday.