Admitting Failure

It’s not always failure that holds you back from doing your best work. Sometimes, it’s success.

How so? Well, by focusing only on your success you will not see where you can improve, and you might miss out on new opportunities because they do not fit into your “this has always worked before” paradigm. As your environment changes around you, you need to be able to adapt to fit into it best and take advantage of new opportunities, and if you keep doing things because they have always worked before, you may get to a point where you can do them really well, but they are no longer relevant.

It’s easy to say you are going to work on continuous improvement; maybe you will, maybe you won’t. But if you announce it publicly, you will not only be making a commitment to addressing your failures, you are liable to get some good ideas along the way.

This, at least, seems to be the theory behind Admitting Failure, a website created by Engineers Without Borders Canada, a nonprofit international development group based in Toronto. The idea is to give nonprofit groups around the world a space in which they can discuss their failures, which has the combined effect of sharing lessons within a global community while also soliciting new ideas for overcoming those missteps. Groups can submit a story about a failure of theirs, providing a summary as well as a full report that can provide helpful lessons for others as well as being a vehicle for collecting suggestions for the future.

Granted, it’s a little different for nonprofits to do this than it is for private companies. You may not want to reveal your failures to your competitors (then again, remember that nonprofits face competition as well, as they compete for donor dollars). You can still do something in-house, though, whether it is an annual report on failures or a forum on your intraweb, or something internal like that. You can keep it anonymous, but you may lose some of the impact if people are not confident enough to attach their name to it.

Admitting failure is hard to do, something that seems especially true in Asian cultures. We have egos. We have bosses. We have clients, customers, and donors. We have years and years of social pressure telling us we must be perfect, or at least appear so. There is a valid fear that if we admit we are not always right, people will look for someone else who is (or, at least, someone who claims to be).

On the other hand, your transparency can often lead others to trust you more. If you are so confident in your abilities that you are willing to publicly discuss your mistakes, it can lead others to have more confidence in you, too. Potential employees may be attracted to an environment where failure is accepted as a part of innovation, and efforts are made to learn from it, rather than an environment where failures are punished and the only people who do well are the ones who never take chances.

Innovation does not occur if you focus only on what has worked before. Learning from failure is one of the most effective ways to improve, but sometimes we need something to motivate us to put that into practice. Publicly discussing your failures can make you eager to publicly discuss how you have fixed them. Even if you keep the discussion within your organization, rather than broadcasting it worldwide, the fact that the discussion is taking place openly will increase your chances of learning.

(Visit Admitting Failure to learn more.)