In an industry narrative which espouses the learning opportunity of failure, Sara Tate and Anna Vogt believe now is time to change the narrative surrounding overcoming failure.
“Great. Another bloody learning opportunity” I think to myself in the middle of clearing up whatever proverbial has just hit the fan. Mistakes, failures, setbacks, whatever we choose to call them, there seems to be a craze of learning from them. LinkedIn is packed with ‘what brands can learn from the party-gate disaster’ or ‘what we can learn from almost becoming utterly undone whilst home-schooling during the pandemic’.
We give ourselves whiplash craning our gaze back over our shoulders trying to dissect our most recent slip up at work or at home. Believing that if we can analyse what went wrong for long enough, then we will avoid it next time round. But as failures pile up around us thick and fast, for those too tired to absorb much more learning, I’d like to propose some new approaches to overcoming failures.
Sometimes failures are false data points. As a case in point, Dolly Parton once lost a Dolly Parton look-alike contest. But human brains are pattern seeking machines, so we are tempted to process all data points onto a narrative. We create patterns when they aren’t really any there, hence conspiracy theories and the seeing the face of Jesus in a tomato. We can do the same with failures. If we experience something going wrong, plus the sting and shame of a loss then we weave it into a story. It wasn’t a random chance; it was a lesson to be learned and a sign of what will happen if we try again. Yet sometimes failures are just a random occurrence in your story line. They aren’t a portent of more problems to come or indicators of future failure. They are just a single, disappointing outcome that we shouldn’t weave a limiting narrative around.
This is a view regularly shared by renowned Sports Psychologist Jamil Qureshi who believes that fear of failure is one of the biggest inhibitors to success and that much of this fear is totally unfounded. He jokes that fear stands for False Evidence Appearing Real and warns not to build failures into a narrative or pattern where there isn’t one. As ge explains: ‘A golfer is aiming to be number one in the world in two years time. If he loses one match does that loss say anything about his ability to meet his long-term ambition? Does a loss today have any bearing on his long-term success? Absolutely not.’ .
Sometimes failures are just a random occurrence in your story line. They aren’t a portent of more problems to come or indicators of future failure. They are just a single, disappointing outcome that we shouldn’t weave a limiting narrative around
Sara Tate, Executive Coach, Brand Consultant and Author
Another option to move past failures is to embrace them. Don’t try to decode or learn from them, just give them a big welcome hug. After all, one of the only guarantees in life and business is that nothing will always go right. Trying to avoid failures makes us risk averse and can stifle innovation and creative thinking, so getting used to them seems like a good approach. In some educational settings children are so focussed on avoiding things going wrong that it stymies their learning progress.
Head teacher Heather Hanbury at Wimbledon High School went as far as creating ‘failure week’ to build resilience and encourage girls to embrace risk. The pupils were encouraged to try new activities and explore how it felt to fail, as well as hearing talks from parents around their own missteps. Hanbury said: “The girls need to learn how to fail well – and how to get over it and cope with it. Fear of failing can be really crippling and stop the girls doing things they really want to do. The pupils are hugely successful but can sometimes overreact to failure even though it can sometimes be enormously beneficial to them.”
Trying to avoid failures makes us risk averse and can stifle innovation and creative thinking
Sara Tate, Executive Coach, Brand Consultant and Author
A quarter of start-ups close in the first year and 60% fold within the first three years according to data from Gov.uk. While Nielsen data shows us that 80 percent of all new product launches in grocery stores fail. Over half (52%) of the Fortune 500 companies from 2000 are now extinct and while the life expectancy of these companies used to be around 75 years, that horizon has shrunk to 15 (Berman, 2022). You get the point.
In today’s VUCA climate who and what is on the up changes thick and fast. So rather than learning from failures, a better skill might be to learn how to recover from them. Spend less time looking back to see what went wrong and more time looking forwards to understand how we get back on track and back on our feet. Troy Ruhanen, TBWA Global CEO, uses the phrase ‘stop admiring the problem’. A powerful exhortation to put our valuable time and energy into thinking of a solution, then going over what is in the past. So next time things go awry just keep your eyes focused on what’s next, not what came before.
Sara Tate is co-author of the new book The Rebuilders: Going From Setback to Comeback in Business and Beyond, co-written with Anna Vogt and published by Kogan Page on 3rd June 2022, priced at £12.99.
Sara Tate is an Executive Coach, Brand Consultant and Author. She was voted Best Leader in Marketing by Women in Marketing Awards and won Campaign's Female Frontier Award. She co-hosts The Rebuilders podcast. Tate was previously CEO of TBWA\London and prior to that a partner at Lucky Generals and Managing Director of Mother London. She was the first woman appointed to Mother’s board and the first MD the agency had appointed. She is also a member of Women in Advertising and Communications, London.
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