Success is not final, failure is not fatal. —Winston Churchill
We live in an era of overindulgence. While the media likes to turn the spotlight on our junk food and computer game-addicted youth, our overindulgence is not confined to the physical (or lack thereof). Today, our psychological lives also are characterized by relentless positivism and happiness delusions as we strive to create a perpetual mono-emotional state, such that we can never be truly sated.
One of the problems with our overindulgence in the positivity and hope fantasies touted by much of the self-help school is that they inform so many of our strategies in business, and in life, for that matter. Added to this is the fact that they’re not especially helpful if we want to achieve actual results.
Sure, they’re entertaining and they temporarily make us feel good (self-help’s comparison with rock concerts is well earned: You leave on a high, buy the merchandise, and a month later, it’s all gathering dust). But the motivation industry’s almost religious status has convinced many of us to abandon our own cognitive processes and “follow our bliss”: Trust the universe and invest in a corkboard! (It’s important to note at this point that there is a huge distinction between affirmations and mental rehearsal.)
Consequently, great ideas, extraordinary teams, powerful organizations, and some exceptionally gifted and talented individuals often fail. This is principally because they haven’t even considered the possibility of failure, let alone designed an environment or processes that can help them thrive in spite of it.
Worse, they come to blame themselves and process failure as a character trait rather than as simply another result, however undesired it may be.
For instance, if we were to suggest to you that you volunteer to be the test subject for a never-before-tested parachute design that we were really positive and fist-pumpingly confident about, how readily would you give up the option of a reserve chute? The question is almost ridiculous, and yet this formula is repeated in offices, homes, schools, and fitness centers around the planet every day. In fact, rather than being the exception, it has become the strategic norm. We have designed our world in such a way that only perfect execution can succeed…and just in case you haven’t taken a good look around recently, perfection is pretty rare.
Of course, there are a number of reasons for this. It is in our natures to err toward optimism. Hope is quite possibly the most powerful drug we have ever injected into our cerebellums, and many of us have an addiction so acute that we will sacrifice almost everything to satisfy it.
Now we’re certainly not suggesting that optimism underscored with effort is a bad thing—quite the contrary. What we’re talking about is the baseless optimism that dominates so much of our social commentary and leaves us impotent in the face of reality. More importantly, we’re asserting that one of the consequences of this kind of optimism is that we court failure by not accounting for it.
We act as if we are generous, bold, and intelligent all the time, and as a result, we adopt hope as a strategy. We shun criticism as pessimism, and at the first sign of negativity, we put our fingers in our ears and chant, “I’m not listening, I’m not listening.” Or else, we double down on a positivity bender and cavort like an evangelical congregation reciting cheery affirmations laced with doubt and desperation: “I am rich, thin, and successful…I am a preciously unique snowflake filled with abundance,” and the like.
The truth is, we set ourselves up for failure.
Children in modern life are, rather notoriously, never allowed to experience anything remotely like failure (heaven forbid they miss out on a “pass the parcel” prize). As a result, failure hits them hard when real life refuses to grade them on a curve suspended over a padded floor with a loving acceptance of “their own special spelling.”
Of course it’s easy to pick on children and no one will thank us for it, so let’s turn our attention to the adult world. The same can be said of most corporate and government processes, business systems, and self-management programs. The more you set strategy or design systems without a consciousness of even the possibility of failure, the greater the chance of realizing that failure actually is.
Diets—or “wellness programs” as they have come to be euphemized—are famous for simultaneously promising the virtually impossible in record time, and for almost universally failing to provide lasting results. And yet, the more preposterous the claim and the more inflated the possibility, the more these books, powders, audio programs, and reality television shows seem to sell.
What’s more concerning is that when we do eventually fail or backslide (the faith-based terminology is not coincidental), we end up blaming ourselves rather than the system we’ve bought into. We desperately self-flagellate as our internal dialogue runs to phrases such as, “I’m weak…I’m hopeless…I can’t do it…” and so the cycle continues.
By ignoring the possibility of failure in our thinking, we unwittingly increase the chances of it ultimately eventuating.
Contrast this strategy with the design parameters of commercial aircraft. In 2012, while speaking at an international business summit in Bangkok, Thailand, we struck up a conversation with another speaker, Richard de Crespigny. Richard is the Qantas pilot who successfully landed QF32, the Airbus A380 that, en route from Singapore to Sydney, experienced catastrophic engine failure causing an enormous hole in the wing (which, it is pretty well agreed by all flying experts, is rather a bad thing to happen!).
In a typically Australian, self-deprecating way, Richard is quick to deflect credit for the safe arrival away from his skills as a pilot and onto his crew and his aircraft. But when you probe a little deeper into his story, you really do get a sense of just how “foolproof” the systems built into the A380 actually are.
It turns out that all commercial aircraft are designed with the possibility that they may crash taken into consideration. And this stretches to considerably more than the life vest and its amazing light and whistle combination (which, no doubt, is immensely reassuring as you bob up and down in the middle of a vast ocean).
Failure, it turns out, actually is factored into the engineering.
Excerpt from “Selfish, Scared & Stupid” by Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan (Wiley). For more information, visit www.selfishscaredandstupid.com.
Dan Gregory and Kieran Flanagan are behavioral researchers and strategists, specializing in behaviors and belief systems—what drives, motivates, and influences us. They have won business awards around the world for innovation, creativity, and return on investment working with such organizations as Coca-Cola, Unilever, News Corp, and the United Nations in Singapore. They are passionate advocates for the commercial power of creativity and a return to more human engagement, cultures, and leadership.
