Permitted to Fail: Building Resilient and Solution-Oriented Teams

The secret sauce to many successful businesses is having a culture that encourages failure as a necessary process of victory. Failure, when handled right, becomes a powerful tool for refinement, improvement, and expansion. Failing well entails an upward attitude, a resilient temperament, and a realizable conviction.

It is a well-known fact that failure is one of the most powerful tools of innovation. It takes an unspecific number failures to achieve success; whether the success is the development of a new product that solves a current mechanical or technological problem, or a new solution that resolves a problematic line of reasoning or false abstraction. Failure is a necessary prerequisite to success. 

We can observe the power of failure, as a means of success, in human terms. A toddler fails hundreds of times before the toddler can walk. A teenager fails innumerable times before he or she learns how to no longer behave as a child. Similarly, a marriage fails many times before the partners learn the art of oneness, togetherness, and unity. In each case, the permission to fail is tied to a goal that is of greater value than the combined failures. Failure is therefore surpassed by a greater goal. For example, the toddler’s goal is to walk like his or her parents. The teenager’s goal is to separate from his or her parents in order to become a self-sufficient, contributing member of society. The marital goal is to form a new family that merges the practices, ideals, and beliefs of both partners into a new unity that is able to withstand the tests of adversity and time. Failure and the art of persevering through failure is an elemental requirement for individual and corporate success. In every case an explicit goal precedes failure. Furthermore, the acceptance of the goal establishes the need for permission to fail in the process. This is a fundamental requirement along the journey of failing toward success.

The art of failing for success is a powerful tool for driving a culture of team engagement and ownership; not as a force of manipulative coercion but as a force for corporate vitality—that is, a culture of contagious, energetic confidence in the attainment of the team’s goals. Any business, whether a product or service, must artfully and carefully consider the inherent culture that comprises the totality of the working environment. Goals must be clearly articulated with specific boundaries that determine success. With this foundation a working culture can be shaped to encourage failure as a tool to minimize fear and aim for success. The following “FEARS-Framework” contains five points that are particularly helpful for building resilient and solution-oriented teams.

• F - Frame Specify the Uncrossable Boundaries: Boundaries are absolutely necessary. People need to know what boundaries should not be crossed toward achieving the goal. This could include authority boundaries, liability boundaries, compliance boundaries, financial expenditure boundaries, channel development boundaries, and sales boundaries. Define these boundaries clearly and frame each in relevant terms for the business and its employees. 
• E - Encourage Radical Problem Solving: Being a part of radical problem solving can be a contagious experience. It encourages a burst of creativity and wild thinking that can lead to increased enthusiasm and shared vision. Everyone becomes a contributing and thinking participant. In order to accomplish this well all worry of reprisal must be eliminated by management. Radical problem solving involves thinking of ideas, processes, or solutions that are ordinarily situated outside of the company’s focus. 
• A - Accentuate the Event of Failure as a Victory: Instead of pointing to failure as a defeat, failure as a victory encourages solution-oriented thinking. Part of life is wading through the options of choice and action and learning the signs of what not to select. Treat each failure as a step towards clarity. This will help the team hone in on what truly works. Failure enables the team to more precisely focus their efforts by articulating and defining what does not work. This is the process of achieving precision. Celebrate this failure as a victory toward success. 
• R - Reward the Failures Along the Way: Rewards are earned. Learning to fail well, that is failing with an upward look toward the fast-approaching victory, is a learned skill. Highlight the individuals in the team that identified the failure based on speed of failure identification, appropriateness of behavior in the process of identification, and the manner in which the failure was communicated to the team and leadership. An honorable fail does not belittle others or wallows in discouragement. Instead, an honorable fail sees the victory through the failure and encourages the team to press on toward the goal. Leaders should praise the individual, the team, and the fact of the event of failure as meriting praise; for the accumulation of victories leads to the successful attainment of the goal. 
• S - See the Victory by Memorializing the End: The end goal is the primary aim of all effort. It is important that the end is clearly envisioned by all team members at the start. In order to reach the end, the end must be memorialized before the journey begins. And, when the end is reached the end must be re-memorialized as an accomplishment that all achieved. The bookends of the journey are important toward developing shared vision and shared accomplishment. This is part of fostering a culture that emphasizes the human need for quality relationship. A victorious team is more tightly knit in the memorial than an individual that accomplished it all. The memorial drives a culture of relationship. 

Businesses that desire to thrive as revenue-making enterprises learn how to manage the process of failure. By developing a culture where failure is not only permitted but is celebrated as part of the necessary journey toward success, companies can minimize corporate and individual fears of failure while cultivating resilient, engaged teams that are committed, united, and driven for long-term growth. The “FEARS Framework” encourages organizations to adopt a powerful principle that is inherent in the art of success; namely, success is achieved by learning to fail well.