Practicing the Art of Failing Forward

Practicing the Art of Failing Forward

It seems that people are more afraid of failure than ever. It has become a short-sighted reason for hesitation, over-engineering, and not taking a chance when the risk is minimal. Even Tim Woods is getting closer to having Stagnation as its middle name. However, what seems more apparent is that it is not that most people aren’t afraid of failure itself. What appears to be holding them back is something quieter and less obvious. What is missing is the action to practice failing forward.

Think about it from the perspective that a failure is not a single moment. Instead, the failure is the act of obtaining a skill or insight, which, without an action, you are never exposed to. It is a form of muscle memory built from trying, sometimes falling short, yet scaled. As the saying goes, three out of ten can get you in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But the system rewards perfection over practice and outcomes over attempts. We seem too focused on what we did do, versus what we did not do.

For starters, it is more fun. - ReThinking: Matthew McConaughey on avoiding cynicism and finding gratitude

We have systems that incentivize avoiding mistakes by instead amplifying a fictitious burden that exists within an attempt. By not incentivizing action holistically, we remove the rehearsal space that embraces failure as part of learning. Failure then becomes foreign and cultivates a blame culture that succumbs in the absence of practicing to fail.

I tend to embrace testing an emergency drill during a planned outage, going well, to see how ready we are. I tend to test emergency circuits on the last piece of a production schedule. Isn’t it the optimum time to see what would happen if a true emergency happened in the middle of a production run? Some have described these approaches as radical, irrational, and unnecessary. My typical response is something in the context of a question to find a better time to practice to fail. Crickets.

Watch a musician putting the notes of a song together for the first time. Watch an athlete walk up to a plate and take practice swings, prior to a reset that couples composure and focus. In manufacturing, leaders should be tasked with running stress tests on processes and procedures, not to prove compliance, but to expose weak points.

Opportunities to practice for failure are everywhere, but only if we look for them. Practicing failure does not mean one is choosing to be reckless. It means choosing growth over unvalidated certainty. Without practice, small lessons learned feed momentum. Stagnation is a precursor of death. A failure rehearsal becomes the necessary step to minimize the likelihood of an unprepared failure. When we create a culture in manufacturing where practicing failure is accepted, we unlock a culture that stretches and iterates. We learn how to dance.

On moon bright nights like this, they got deer tiptoeing to larger openings so they can dance better because they can see where the rocks are at. - Hondo Crouch.