How to Succeed at Failure

I read a good post by Steve Kelman, How to Succeed at Failure. I'm a little disappointed that he failed to hit on a couple of issues. First, anything that is difficult is likely to have failures along the way. Even more important, anything worthwhile is going to have to overcome those failures. So if you want to do something that is both difficult and value-adding, you have to plan for failures. People get freaked out when I say that. Here is what I mean...

First, you have to have a safety valve, or some formal mechanism that helps you to stop the loss at a certain point. Contracts are a convenient entity in this regard. Your ability, my ability, anyone's ability to plan is limited by the horizon of what they can effectively see. The more variable you introduce, the closer that horizon gets. Plan for what you can accomplish in one year. You can have a longer term strategy and aspirations, but tactically stick to a year or less. Get to the finish line in yearly increments. If you do this, and things start going off course, then at least every year you have an opportunity to recalibrate and implement corrections. Don't lock in to some 5-year behemoth.

When you fail, and realize that you will fail all the time, take time to learn something. I personally beat myself up over failures. Read this blog, almost every topic that I write about, from BVAs to Quality Management to Contract Types are all born out of failures. In those cases, something didn't go as well as I expected it to, so I needed to come up with a new method. The point is, that failures need to be constructive. Make a point out of learning something from them. A failure is an investment, your future actions will decide whether the investment paid off.

Lastly, organizationally, you have to walk a fine line. First, you want to centralize A&R (Accountability and Responsibility) on a single person, but you need to expect that things happen and failures are likely. So you need to foster a learning organization. You want to hold people accountable for certain levels or performance but you don't want to be so harsh that a failure here and there is the end of the world to a person. The point to make from an organizational perspective is that the same person or team won't experience the same cause of a failure.