Questions on Failure

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Jewell on January 26, 2010 at 15:37

1: Decided to start out in consultancy working with my best friend and colleague from a previous job. Within a year (which actually started very successfully) we had got into a very serious position of relationship breakdown between that eventually undermined the company and destroyed our friendship

2: I ended up in a highly contradictory phase where we were trying to wind up the company in a professional manner and at the same time deal with an acrimonious relationship where clearly great care and concern for each other existed before. I acquiesced on money in a desperate attempt to preserve the friendship but I underestimated the damage that had been caused. By the time I realise only I was trying to save 'us' I had moved into a state where I saw him as greedy and unscrupulous. It took a long time to get over.

3: I think I greatly developed my intellectual and emotional sophistication. I learnt a lot about how businesses go bad that helped me later when I was working with a charity which ended up going into insolvency. And I learnt a lot about relationships, about the dangers of mixing business and pleasure and about the concept of friendship and what it meant to me. Unfortunately I think it is highly unlikely I will ever be able to apply this learning to that relationship that always meant a great deal to me.

4: I think I have a robustness - it might take me a while to bounce back, but I do. I have good social skills and they have helped me to cultivate other good friends, a success in itself, but also meaning not all my eggs were in one basket. My business learning applied to insolvent charity saved a lot of jobs and preserved much of the delivery of service during the rough times we went through, and I regard impact as really important and there I had more visible, human impact than my little consultancy had when it went under.

5: Be really clear about what is at stake when you go into business with a friend and take the relevant precautions to make sure you protect yourself and your relationship through working out things in detail beforehand and dealing with them as they arise. Sometimes win-win means the end of the relationship early and not when things are too sour to retrieve. I could make another consultancy but I doubt I'll ever have that friend back again.

6: I think I would talk to Tessy Britton - after all, she's at the top level of the upper echelons of the RSA -can she too have failed? What's more she's on this site so it might even happen! More importantly, perhaps, her background is incredibly interesting and I am sure she has many stories, if not of her own failure as I hope, of things she has seen in the course of her work. I'd like to understand more about this person, and I know that she has more friends than anyone on this network so perhaps there are others thinking the same...

Permalink Reply by RSA Projects on January 27, 2010 at 11:28

1. My experience of failure was launching a magazine in the 1980s without sufficient funding or understanding of where my publisher was sourcing the funding from. For me the biggest part of the failure was that I had employed two people who very quickly became jobless.

2. On one level I plunged back into work in order to put it behind me. On the other, I felt very wretched about the whole thing for a long time and it made me, for a while, quite negative about my own ambitions.

3. What did you learn from the failure? On the downside, it created an aversion in me to ever being responsible for employing other people. Though I remained friends with both my employees I felt guilty about dragging them in. That has stayed with me and I think I have to count it as a negative. On the positive, it probably left me a little better about practically assessing Greeks who come bearing gifts. It also taught me that what appears to be a catastrophe in June is quickly forgotten by December.

4. I think obviously the foolhardy enthusiasm which was the weak point in this failure is a crucial part of success too. I continue to be a big fan of foolhardy optimism.

5. [Suggest this question needs reframing as there are two possible elements to it a) how to avoid the failure, and b) how others can learn from the failure and I wasn't sure which it was driving at until I read Jonathan's answer.] Don't be afraid of asking to look at the books. I was shy about talking about the cashflow of the organisation who employed me and though I had done the maths about the money, my employer clearly hadn't. I am appallingly English about money and it is not a good thing.

6. Dave Briggs who I encountered because of one of his early successes and who seems good at persuading risk-averse organisations to take risks about how they engage and present themselves.

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Jewell on January 27, 2010 at 22:23

Great start to the thread, William: insightful and open.

You are right about the question, it is a bit ambiguous. And we need to get this right because we're testing them here to use in our video and audio media campaign. By refining it you've made a important contribution to our work by spotting it.

I will edit the questions once a few people have commented, but when we start the interviewing of whoever we select, I think it is very likely that your suggestion will be incorporated.

Do you think we'll be able to get Dave Briggs to do his interview? The text can be forwarded to people outside the group/network and the comments brought back to discuss if people are willing to do that. Might extend our reach a bit.



William Shaw said:

1. My experience of failure was launching a magazine in the 1980s without sufficient funding or understanding of where my publisher was sourcing the funding from. For me the biggest part of the failure was that I had employed two people who very quickly became jobless.

2. On one level I plunged back into work in order to put it behind me. On the other, I felt very wretched about the whole thing for a long time and it made me, for a while, quite negative about my own ambitions.

3. What did you learn from the failure? On the downside, it created an aversion in me to ever being responsible for employing other people. Though I remained friends with both my employees I felt guilty about dragging them in. That has stayed with me and I think I have to count it as a negative. On the positive, it probably left me a little better about practically assessing Greeks who come bearing gifts. It also taught me that what appears to be a catastrophe in June is quickly forgotten by December.

4. I think obviously the foolhardy enthusiasm which was the weak point in this failure is a crucial part of success too. I continue to be a big fan of foolhardy optimism.

5. [Suggest this question needs reframing as there are two possible elements to it a) how to avoid the failure, and b) how others can learn from the failure and I wasn't sure which it was driving at until I read Jonathan's answer.] Don't be afraid of asking to look at the books. I was shy about talking about the cashflow of the organisation who employed me and though I had done the maths about the money, my employer clearly hadn't. I am appallingly English about money and it is not a good thing.

6. Dave Briggs who I encountered because of one of his early successes and who seems good at persuading risk-averse organisations to take risks about how they engage and present themselves.

Permalink Reply by Scott Baron on January 30, 2010 at 17:33

I think the questions are good in a relevant context.

However, I think it is important to consider "failure" in differing ways. eg.

1. Failure as perceived by self. Not always true.

2. Failure as judged by others. Not always true.

Often the concept of "failure" is a complex matter and needs to be carefully considered in context and from differing directions.

Scott Baron - Cheshire

Permalink Reply by Susan Jones on January 30, 2010 at 18:51

Question 1: I failed to continue my practice as an artist in 2002, something I had always managed to retain and maintain quality in - regardless of personal and professional interventions - since I had graduated.

Question 2; Struggled to accept my new 'non-practitioner role - couldn't come to call myself anything else as a professional - denied my 'job title'.


Question 3: I learned that I could apply the creativity and freedom to risk that I experienced in my practice to my professional job - and that it actually worked out better when I did. This helped me to understand how ideas generation and imagination are core business attributes.

Question 4: Because artists - which is where I come from - have to be self-determining and have to find strategies to deal with failure as a matter of course - the picture didn't work, you've got to sort it out, you can't stop experimenting until it does and the pictures may never work again. Artists have to place themselves at a point of uncertainty as a matter of course, so that the potential for failure is always there. Failure rates are high in the making of art works - in my case maybe one out of six works would fail or everything I did over a particular period of time.

Question 5: Sounds banal but lateral thinking, critical thinking, walk round and round something to see how it looks from a different perspective.

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Jewell on January 30, 2010 at 22:00

Okay Scott, if I take your point (which is well made), how does that translate into questions - the exact wording you think we need to see?

Susan Jones said:

Question 1: I failed to continue my practice as an artist in 2002, something I had always managed to retain and maintain quality in - regardless of personal and professional interventions - since I had graduated.

Question 2; Struggled to accept my new 'non-practitioner role - couldn't come to call myself anything else as a professional - denied my 'job title'.


Question 3: I learned that I could apply the creativity and freedom to risk that I experienced in my practice to my professional job - and that it actually worked out better when I did. This helped me to understand how ideas generation and imagination are core business attributes.

Question 4: Because artists - which is where I come from - have to be self-determining and have to find strategies to deal with failure as a matter of course - the picture didn't work, you've got to sort it out, you can't stop experimenting until it does and the pictures may never work again. Artists have to place themselves at a point of uncertainty as a matter of course, so that the potential for failure is always there. Failure rates are high in the making of art works - in my case maybe one out of six works would fail or everything I did over a particular period of time.

Question 5: Sounds banal but lateral thinking, critical thinking, walk round and round something to see how it looks from a different perspective.

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Jewell on January 30, 2010 at 22:05

Susan, that's really quite different to what we've seen before and it's a really interesting insight into your feelings and your perspective.

I don't your answer is banal - if you think what you've learnt is that, and it's a huge amount of learning, then I think we need to have more of that type of failure in the world! Think about the possibilities if we could get people to learn that kind of education when they were in school, or when they were leading at the top of organisations or society!

You didn't recommend anyone else in your post - I wonder if you can think of anyone, on or off this network, that you'd like to hear form - our campaign, hopefully in partnership with the RSA (see my posts in that group) will open up the opportunity for this to happen.

I hope your post inspires others to write.

Jonathan

Susan Jones said:

Question 1: I failed to continue my practice as an artist in 2002, something I had always managed to retain and maintain quality in - regardless of personal and professional interventions - since I had graduated.

Question 2; Struggled to accept my new 'non-practitioner role - couldn't come to call myself anything else as a professional - denied my 'job title'.


Question 3: I learned that I could apply the creativity and freedom to risk that I experienced in my practice to my professional job - and that it actually worked out better when I did. This helped me to understand how ideas generation and imagination are core business attributes.

Question 4: Because artists - which is where I come from - have to be self-determining and have to find strategies to deal with failure as a matter of course - the picture didn't work, you've got to sort it out, you can't stop experimenting until it does and the pictures may never work again. Artists have to place themselves at a point of uncertainty as a matter of course, so that the potential for failure is always there. Failure rates are high in the making of art works - in my case maybe one out of six works would fail or everything I did over a particular period of time.

Question 5: Sounds banal but lateral thinking, critical thinking, walk round and round something to see how it looks from a different perspective.

Permalink Reply by Jonathan Jewell on January 31, 2010 at 0:01

The questions we developed here were intended to be answered by people in the GoF group before we used them in our high profile video and audiovisual campaign. People from celebrities to care-workers, from parents to politicians, from astronauts to academics will be invited to participate in interviews under the banner of our cultural theme (Mitch Sava). William, you have shaped the common questions everyone interviewed will be asked - an important contribution to the campaign.

These interviews will be positioned on our University of Failure website and we intend to build up a repository so we can run one a fortnight over the course of next year. We are looking for a title for this particular thread at the moment - any suggestions are welcome.

The content of these interviews will be developed into a published book (which we'll develop the title and outline for in our regular 'Cultural Theme' meetings and on the Ning site) after we have enough interviews to make it viable. The suggestions people give at the end of their questions for new people will hopefully shape what that book will look like.

I think Mitch will have more to say about this when he's properly online in a couple of weeks. Watch this space!


Jonathan Jewell said:

Great start to the thread, William: insightful and open.

You are right about the question, it is a bit ambiguous. And we need to get this right because we're testing them here to use in our video and audio media campaign. By refining it you've made a important contribution to our work by spotting it.

I will edit the questions once a few people have commented, but when we start the interviewing of whoever we select, I think it is very likely that your suggestion will be incorporated.

Do you think we'll be able to get Dave Briggs to do his interview? The text can be forwarded to people outside the group/network and the comments brought back to discuss if people are willing to do that. Might extend our reach a bit.



William Shaw said:

1. My experience of failure was launching a magazine in the 1980s without sufficient funding or understanding of where my publisher was sourcing the funding from. For me the biggest part of the failure was that I had employed two people who very quickly became jobless.

2. On one level I plunged back into work in order to put it behind me. On the other, I felt very wretched about the whole thing for a long time and it made me, for a while, quite negative about my own ambitions.

3. What did you learn from the failure? On the downside, it created an aversion in me to ever being responsible for employing other people. Though I remained friends with both my employees I felt guilty about dragging them in. That has stayed with me and I think I have to count it as a negative. On the positive, it probably left me a little better about practically assessing Greeks who come bearing gifts. It also taught me that what appears to be a catastrophe in June is quickly forgotten by December.

4. I think obviously the foolhardy enthusiasm which was the weak point in this failure is a crucial part of success too. I continue to be a big fan of foolhardy optimism.

5. [Suggest this question needs reframing as there are two possible elements to it a) how to avoid the failure, and b) how others can learn from the failure and I wasn't sure which it was driving at until I read Jonathan's answer.] Don't be afraid of asking to look at the books. I was shy about talking about the cashflow of the organisation who employed me and though I had done the maths about the money, my employer clearly hadn't. I am appallingly English about money and it is not a good thing.

6. Dave Briggs who I encountered because of one of his early successes and who seems good at persuading risk-averse organisations to take risks about how they engage and present themselves.

Permalink Reply by Tessy Britton on January 31, 2010 at 11:59

Hi Jonathan

Thanks very much for inviting me to comment on Glory of Failure and apologies for taking so long to respond. I have been following the comments on the various discussions on this group and think that this topic is generating some really interest and insights!

Many of my studies over the last few years have touched on this topic, in particular research around the effects of belief and attitudes on behaviour. The work of Albert Bandura on self-efficacy is very interesting, and Carol Dweck's work on Mindset has had a strong influence on my own work. Carol Dweck has studied the effects of groups of beliefs around ability and IQ and describes people as having either a fixed mindset (which favours a view of intelligence as static) and a growth mindset (which favours a view that intelligence develops and changes as we learn about and experience life). The impact of these two types of thinking about ability result in different attitudes toward risk:
fixed= low intellectual risk behaviours to protect internal and external perception of high intelligence
growth= higher intellectual risk behaviours fuelled by a wish to learn and develop.

In an educational setting this research demonstrates how important it is to cultivate a growth mindset which is more open to getting things wrong in order to learn. It also relates directly to divergent thinking - which the classroom often discourages in favour of right/wrong answers. Maureen Wolloshin, commented below, about failure in classrooms being part of everyday work, but also makes an important point about the term Glory of Failure possibly over egging the topic in a school setting. Teachers need to ensure that the message is part of their desire for students to succeed in their studies as well.

Where I see real need in schools is in myth busting and a campaign to do this would have a really positive impact. Children and young people are presented with a very 'polished' view of the world - through all mediums they are presented with the finished product. Paul Buchanan posted a list of famous failures on the group a few days ago. I have presented some of those facts to about several hundred young people aged about 15/16 over the last few years - and this is real news to them - not just because of the hidden failure story of success - but also the idea that other people may give you inaccurate feedback. Your work/idea could be really good, but this is not instantly recognisable by people close to you.

David Jennings mentioned in his comment 'So let's not rely on schools to deliver this moral and pastoral support, because I suspect we'll be heading for a fall if we do.' Once aware of some these dynamics I noticed how often I and other parents were doing the same with our children. When children are young they naturally need protecting from the stresses and strains of adulthood, but as they grow older we do them a disservice by not showing them our own difficulties and how we manage them.

From a personal perspective, I rarely view situations as success or failure. I am very passionate about action research models (to the point of being annoying to others) and generally find a way of applying this to almost all my work. Try things, see how they are going, change them, try again.... The world has changed and it gives us the opportunity to work in a much more tentative, intuitive way. When I worked as an Account Director in a marketing agency in the 80s (when I was about 9 years old) we used to create 5 year strategies, which we methodically implemented to good effect. Funny now! While things are less stable and predicatable, we also have the opportunity now to experiment with ideas for virtually no cost - just in the way that you are doing with this idea on this site.

When Andy Gibson and I started to look at his Mindapples idea, we could play/test with the idea to develop the concepts before committing personal and financial resource. So, we now have well over 1000 responses to the 5-a-day questionnaire (at no cost), and now have some test data to take the idea forward. We are having a planning day next weekend with a group of *amazing* people who have helped evolve the ideas slowly and collaboratively. It is a truly wonderful way to work!

My failures are so numerous I wouldn't know where to start - you could run a site for mistakes and I could contribute to it every day. But nearly all the more obvious failures have been a result of my attention being diverted to more interesting things... so now I try and build this in to my planning.

Permalink Reply by Susan Jones on January 31, 2010 at 16:57

I have found this really interesting to read. I was thinking about the need not only to 'tolerate ambiguity' that I found in a Roanne Dodds' article - see http://www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk/ - on the characteristics for 21st century leaders but about the need to be comfortable about feeling uncomfortable and about not knowing stuff.

Confidentially (!) I very often don't know stuff - even though people may expect me to because I'm 'old and experienced'. I don't always know when I respond to something exactly what will come out of my mouth until I say it. So you could say I risk failing quite a lot and - as with my intervention at the recent State of the Arts conference - failed to get the point I wanted to make across because I either I didn't prepare properly or I thought I needed to risk making it work as it happened.

Is "being diverted" lateral thinking?

Permalink Reply by Susan Jones on January 31, 2010 at 17:01

Jonathan Jewell said:

Susan, that's really quite different to what we've seen before and it's a really interesting insight into your feelings and your perspective.

I don't your answer is banal - if you think what you've learnt is that, and it's a huge amount of learning, then I think we need to have more of that type of failure in the world! Think about the possibilities if we could get people to learn that kind of education when they were in school, or when they were leading at the top of organisations or society!

You didn't recommend anyone else in your post - I wonder if you can think of anyone, on or off this network, that you'd like to hear form - our campaign, hopefully in partnership with the RSA (see my posts in that group) will open up the opportunity for this to happen.

I hope your post inspires others to write.

Jonathan

Susan Jones said:

Question 1: I failed to continue my practice as an artist in 2002, something I had always managed to retain and maintain quality in - regardless of personal and professional interventions - since I had graduated.

Question 2; Struggled to accept my new 'non-practitioner role - couldn't come to call myself anything else as a professional - denied my 'job title'.


Question 3: I learned that I could apply the creativity and freedom to risk that I experienced in my practice to my professional job - and that it actually worked out better when I did. This helped me to understand how ideas generation and imagination are core business attributes.

Question 4: Because artists - which is where I come from - have to be self-determining and have to find strategies to deal with failure as a matter of course - the picture didn't work, you've got to sort it out, you can't stop experimenting until it does and the pictures may never work again. Artists have to place themselves at a point of uncertainty as a matter of course, so that the potential for failure is always there. Failure rates are high in the making of art works - in my case maybe one out of six works would fail or everything I did over a particular period of time.

Question 5: Sounds banal but lateral thinking, critical thinking, walk round and round something to see how it looks from a different perspective.

Permalink Reply by Susan Jones on January 31, 2010 at 17:01

Susan Jones said:

Jonathan Jewell said:

Susan, that's really quite different to what we've seen before and it's a really interesting insight into your feelings and your perspective.

I don't your answer is banal - if you think what you've learnt is that, and it's a huge amount of learning, then I think we need to have more of that type of failure in the world! Think about the possibilities if we could get people to learn that kind of education when they were in school, or when they were leading at the top of organisations or society!

You didn't recommend anyone else in your post - I wonder if you can think of anyone, on or off this network, that you'd like to hear form - our campaign, hopefully in partnership with the RSA (see my posts in that group) will open up the opportunity for this to happen.

I hope your post inspires others to write.

Jonathan

Susan Jones said:

Question 1: I failed to continue my practice as an artist in 2002, something I had always managed to retain and maintain quality in - regardless of personal and professional interventions - since I had graduated.

Question 2; Struggled to accept my new 'non-practitioner role - couldn't come to call myself anything else as a professional - denied my 'job title'.


Question 3: I learned that I could apply the creativity and freedom to risk that I experienced in my practice to my professional job - and that it actually worked out better when I did. This helped me to understand how ideas generation and imagination are core business attributes.

Question 4: Because artists - which is where I come from - have to be self-determining and have to find strategies to deal with failure as a matter of course - the picture didn't work, you've got to sort it out, you can't stop experimenting until it does and the pictures may never work again. Artists have to place themselves at a point of uncertainty as a matter of course, so that the potential for failure is always there. Failure rates are high in the making of art works - in my case maybe one out of six works would fail or everything I did over a particular period of time.

Question 5: Sounds banal but lateral thinking, critical thinking, walk round and round something to see how it looks from a different perspective.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page