Failure Recovery Strategy

Making mistakes in the Social Sector world, recovering and moving on. Killing the fear of failure

There is a failure fetish in the Silicon Valley startup culture where new companies want to “fail fast”. This means trying an experiment, testing to see if the idea can work, and then moving on to something else in a “pivot” if the idea doesn't work. In contrast, we fear failure in the Social Sectors.
My chosen Social Sector field of international humanitarian assistance has put me on the cutting edge of trying to provide help to people hit by natural disasters or recovering from civil war. As Social Sector professionals we are out in the real life doing the hard work, just as when a startup company tries to begin operations. We live and work in a similar type of  “fail fast” Silicon Valley environment where the approach becomes establishing an idea, testing it, and making adjustments based on the outcome. However, this is where the parallel breaks down. 

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International disaster relief suffers from the same phobia as governments, academic institutions and other social-good structures. We fear failure. We hate to admit that we are wrong. We suffer criticism if we appear to have taken public money or charitable donations and used them for a project that did not work as expected. 

This failure fear puts us into a defensive position that reduces the negative and positive risks that we take in our work and life. It becomes easier as a Social Sector worker to stay within an easy, uncontroversial middle ground of average performance. Staying this course for a month, a year or a career turns our field into a mushy middle of basic achievement without the opportunity for positive evolution that could make an exponential difference in the challenges that we undertake.

Pushing to failure
The Social Sectors need more failure. We need professionals in our field to understand the positive aspects that can come from failure, in order to decisively exploit opportunity. Failure is the result of trying many things. Different things. Various ways of solving problems. New ways of thinking. Pushing an idea to the edge. It means developing a huge stack of options, picking the best few and then trying them in  real world scenarios.  The next step is watching and seeing what works against the criteria that you set for success, making changes, and doing it all again. 

Failure is essential because it is an indicator that you are pushing up against your outer limits. It is a sign that you are evolving and that you are trying things that could eventually bring you massive gains in your Social Sector mission or life. 

I have always been afraid of failure. I still fear failure, but am learning the technique of pushing up against that fear to make my life and work vastly better. As a child, my parents were neutral on the failure issue. They never pushed me beyond my internal level of discipline, but they also did not help me understand the inevitable self worth hit that comes with the untrained mind failing at a task. When my untrained mind failed in the past, fear consumed me.  The radio station of fear blasts in my brain: I’m inadequate, lack intelligence and everyone I know thinks I’m an idiot for even trying in the first place.  Only a few years ago did I realize that fear training for your mind and body can make a massive positive difference. 

Through studying people who did things that mattered consistently, even with occasional failure,  I was able to train my mind to deal with failure fear and take on the right kind of risks. My deep- seated aversion to failure that I lived with for most of my life is not yet gone. I still work on this almost every day, but I’ve developed a few techniques that have helped me along the way. There are two parts to the mental framework to overcome fear: Understanding the real risk of not trying, and reducing the real cost of an experiment not working out. 

The real cost of not trying
The primary way to train your brain to be able to try, fail and recover is to understand the real cost of not trying and inevitably failing at some things. Without failure you are condemning yourself to a life of mediocrity and watered down repetition that brings a known outcome. At the end of your life, on your deathbed, would you rather know that you stayed safe within a set boundary, or would you rather know that you left everything on the table and lived at your ultimate potential? Life can be adequate and even good in the mushy middle. In fact, working more on happiness philosophy, and making achievement irrelevant, could be an enlightened way to live. But I prefer to find the place of happy striving, at the outer edge that brings the most impact in my chosen areas of work and life. 

Controlling downside risk when failing
There is a common misconception among non-entrepreneurs that people who have started successful ideas in the Social or private sectors are massive risk takers who throw caution to the wind. This is inaccurate.  The highest level operators control for unacceptable risk, while being comfortable with a level of risk that they can accept. They make failure irrelevant by knowing that they can survive a worst case scenario. 

Building up our failure muscle
We can build our failure tolerance muscle by pushing to the edge in small, inconsequential ways. These small actions can build momentum and accustom our minds and bodies to the practice of pushing to the edge, which inevitably leads to failure, learning, and positive progression. We can try to purposely push to the edge and fail in one concrete way per week. Here are a few ways to build your failure muscle:

• Try to finish a work task in half the time that you would have normally allotted. 
  
• If you are an introvert, speak up in a meeting or interaction where you would normally stay silent. 
  
• Try one thing totally new where you have no skill (hobby, sport, musical instrument)
  

Making it work for you
Social Sector Strivers like us can use the same techniques. We must internalize the only real risk of not trying, and make our actions safe enough that we don’t lose everything in a worst case scenario. Black swan events happen. Early death, sickness, complete loss and ultimate destruction by nature or people are real, and the ultimate fate is sealed (death in the end). But it doesn’t happen most of the time. It probably won’t happen today.  And these moments are precious and fleeting. Most of the time we are limited only by our failure fear aversion. Mental training in this space can bring out our ultimate contribution to our Social Sector mission, and help us enjoy the spinoff aspects of a true and full life of our own design. 

In what ways have you trained your failure muscle? Hit me up at [email protected] or leave a post at www.socialsectortitan.com.

Happy Trails!

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