Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2015. Its “earlier this year” refers to 2015, when The Other “F” Word by John Danner and Mark Coopersmith was published.
Every failure is an experience, and every experience is a success. That is why some of today’s most successful people, such as Mark Cuban, Oprah Winfrey and Paul Allen, have said they have learned great lessons from failure.
Failure is an inevitable step on the road to success, but how can we get over it and achieve our goals?
Earlier this year, two professors from the University of California, Berkeley’s business school published a book called The Other F Word, in which they offer a framework of 7 steps for using failure as a valuable resource for success.
Here are six of the seven steps that can help you overcome failure, in what the authors, John Danner and Mark Coopersmith, call the failure value cycle.
See also: How a series of failures leads you to success: connecting the dots
1. Respect and anticipate failure to reduce your fear of it
It starts with recognising and accepting that failure can happen. “Failure is like gravity, a universal and ever-present force,” says Coopersmith. “In order to turn this recurring regret into a strategic resource, companies have to stop denying it and ignoring it.”
2. Rehearse to sharpen your reflexes
Rehearsing for failure can help a company get back to business more quickly. To do this, Coopersmith and Danner suggest applying what they call the “golden rule”, which means “do it to yourself before others do it to you”.
“Companies should regularly and creatively assess their own most fragile vulnerabilities, the ones exposed to and exploited by competitors eager to win customers and market share,” says Danner.
See also: How to recover after a business failure
3. Recognise the signs of failure before you lose time
An “early warning system” can buy a company time to make better decisions and minimise the effects of failure. Coopersmith and Danner recommend rewarding customers, suppliers and employees for identifying areas for improvement.
4. React quickly to minimise the damage
This is where “companies can shine in adversity,” says Coopersmith. “It’s important to have a plan for how your company deals with failure, the way a hospital emergency room does, and to be willing to call a time-out to understand the situation clearly and prepare your response,” the authors say.
5. Reflect to draw out insights
This is about taking the time to really understand what happened and why, and what it means for you and your company. “Treating failure as feedback, as a positive resource, will be beneficial.”
It is a matter of asking the right questions in the right order. “What, why, how, where and when? That will probably produce a better understanding.” This will allow leaders to engage employees in a useful conversation about “developing a response that has positive implications for the culture, for productivity and for the ability to better incorporate perspectives and people in the next stage.”
See also: How to fail in business without losing your dignity
6. Remember, to strengthen the workplace culture
In their book, Coopersmith and Danner highlight four important ways of keeping failure in mind constructively:
- Stories: lessons from failure that are introduced informally, at the most fundamental level, into the organisation’s cultural narrative.
- Rituals: repeated activities that highlight the most important aspects of the failure.
- Relics: physical objects that remind the organisation of what it learned from each failure.
- Reports: an official commemoration of the failure and the lessons learned.
Danner and Coopersmith hold up Instagram as an example of a company that achieved success by applying these steps. When Instagram’s founders talked to their first customers, they were told the app was too complicated.
The customers did, however, love the app’s photo section. So the founders went off and built the simple photo app that reached 150 million users twice as fast as Twitter.
“When they talked to their customers and were told the product would be a failure, that it was too complicated, that they weren’t sure how to use it, they listened and asked themselves what was going wrong and how they could succeed.”
The authors also tell how one company that failed several times (39 times, to be exact) bounced back and went on to succeed, growing to a current valuation of 1.3 million dollars.
See also: If you’re going to fail in business, this is the way to do it
Featured image: Thank You (25 Millions ) views, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
