“FAILING” YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS: THE VALUE OF NEGATIVE THINKING
BY MICHAEL F. STALEY
Learning how to fail is an important part of learning how to be a great leader. Through failure, you certainly get to know yourself. But, better than that, you develop a more agile mind. When it occurs to you that it`s possible to fail, you think a situation through and develop fallback positions or bail-outs. You look for “emergency exits” on your way into situations.
Understanding failure and considering it as a very real possibility will not only give you the ability to enter every situation with options, but it will help you to recognize impending failure in time for you to exercise those options. Let me give you an example. The successful leader–one who knows failure–is ordered to enter a burning warehouse with a team of firefighters. Because he knows that this is dangerous and they might not succeed in getting this fire under control before the floor caves in, he scans the warehouse for exits and builds safeguards into his strategies. He runs a mental inventory of everything he knows could go wrong and makes decisions in advance about how he`s going to handle them. Before his team goes in, he makes sure all know how they`re going to get out, no matter what happens.
He knows how to do this because he knows failure. He can recognize what author Pearl S. Buck calls the “halfway moment” of the mistake. She wrote, “Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split-second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.” But you`ll never learn to recognize halfway moments unless you cross one or two. Of course, we both know that crossing a “halfway moment” means you`ve passed the point of no return. You`re into full-blown failure. This is what makes it a great mistake. In fact, the greater the mistake, the greater the lessons to be learned. It`s important to fail so you`ll learn where failure is.
A leader who has never experienced failure might lead this team into the warehouse without planning for anything but success. With a cocky can-do attitude and the certainty that defeat is impossible, he might swashbuckle his way into disaster. When the floor starts to crumble, it`s too late to start thinking about locating exits and counting firefighters. Dr. Karl E. Weick, expert and noted author on organizational behavior, says, “What we do not expect under life-threatening pressure is creativity.”
PRACTICE TO FAIL
Of course, those of us who work in emergency services can`t fail on the job. It isn`t acceptable to stand in the rubble and ruins amid dead bodies and crow, “Hey! I now know where that halfway moment is! I crossed it!” The consequences of failure when you`re responsible for life and property are devastating. And yet, you have to operate with a fundamental understanding of failure to be good at your job. In Young Men and Fire, author Norman Maclean writes that, if the major purpose of your group is to “put out fires so fast they don`t have time to become big ones,” then you will never learn much about fighting big fires. It`s a conundrum, to be sure.
Since 1990, wildfires have claimed more than 23 firefighters` lives. These lives might have been saved if the firefighters had dropped their tools to outrun the fire or had deployed their shelters to protect themselves. Psychologists and industry professionals have spent years analyzing the seemingly incomprehensible decisions that led to these deaths. The theories are complex and have been well-published.
But a central theme emerges among them all. These firefighters simply could not grasp the concept that they were failing. They were unable to recognize the halfway moment of the mistake. Because of this, they were unprepared to drop into Plan B. They had no fall-back positions. No escape plans. When the failure was fully upon them, this was clearly and certainly no time for creativity. And further, I think that when a firefighter is stubbornly melded to the idea that failure is impossible, the firefighter will take risks that are foolish. The peril is compounded. Now, not only will the firefighter launch into deadly territory without an escape plan, but he will have no clue that the situation has gone past the point of no return. Worse than that, the firefighter is seldom alone.
The trick to mastering failure without getting killed and destroying civilization as we know it is that you have to practice crossing those pesky halfway moments. Fortunately for you, emergency services provide ample opportunity for simulation training. Unfortunately for you, your trainers are teaching you to do everything perfectly so that your outcomes will be successful. It might be up to you to take your training one step further and add “Failure 101” to your personal curriculum.
TRAIN TO FAIL
Dr. Weick suggests that an effective strategy for putting failure into your experience is to “over-train to failure.” The benefits will be twofold: First, you`ll learn to recognize halfway moments and, second, you`ll learn that failure is success when it saves your life. Play the game “What if?” Take every training exercise, and make the longest, most creative list of possible disastrous outcomes you can. Let`s say you`re hauling a hose. What if you trip and fall on your face? What if a truck runs over the hose and crushes it? What if the water cuts off? What if the hose wraps around a post? What if it`s freezing at the fire scene and your hands are too cold to work? What if you suddenly find yourself standing in a pool of gasoline? What if a fellow firefighter collapses right in front of you? What if the building you`re applying water to explodes? What if …? What if …? What if …?
Of course, thinking is good, but practicing is even better. Like Dr. Weick says, “over-train to failure.” Simulating your response to failure will sharpen your skill and deepen your instincts. Remember, sometimes when disaster strikes, you respond from your gut. Your instincts take over. You react without thinking. If your reaction is one that you`ve practiced in simulation, the chances are better that you`ll drop right into your Plan B instead of wasting precious seconds trying to intellectualize, analyze, and search for creative solutions. At the halfway moment, there aren`t any.
WHY WE (WRONGLY) GIVE FAILURE A BAD RAP
One of the reasons that failure is so repugnant to us is that we are taught from early childhood that we are all taught the undeniable superiority of success. Even as kids, we spent every recess playing competitive games where there were winners (those who succeeded) and losers (those who failed). Winning is equated with succeeding and is the only acceptable outcome of any endeavor in our culture. Vince Lombardi, famed coach of the Green Bay Packers, said, “Winning isn`t the important thing. It`s everything.”
In fact, winning isn`t everything. Succeeding is. They are distinctly different. When winning is so important to you that you take unnecessary risks and deny the possibility of failure to the detriment of your ability to plan properly, you seriously move yourself and the people who count on you toward disaster. In emergency services, you have to learn to make distinctions between winning and succeeding. Start now.
FAILURE CLEARS A PATH FOR SUCCESS
When I think of people who have failed, I am reminded of the true story of a man who couldn`t seem to do anything right. He attended school only intermittently as he was growing up, but he was highly ambitious. As a young man, he threw his hat into the ring for the Illinois General Assembly but lost the election. So, he enlisted in the military, was assigned to a rifle company, and achieved the rank of captain. Unfortunately, his company disbanded, necessitating his reenlistment as a private. Back to square one. After serving in the military, he returned home to work in a store that subsequently went out of business. So he bought a store of his own with a partner. It, too, failed, leaving him badly in debt. His partner died a year later, plunging him further into debt. His sweetheart died the following year. He had a nervous breakdown.
After he recovered, he made a bid for the U.S. Congress. He lost the election. He tried again and was elected to the Illinois legislature but declined the seat to run for the U.S. Senate. He lost the election. Then he was nominated to run as the candidate for Republican Senator from Illinois but lost the election after stunning and now famous (and humiliatingly public) debates with his opponent. What a loser! Right? Wrong. This man who couldn`t seem to do anything right was Abraham Lincoln. As you know, in 1860, he was elected the 16th U.S. President and the first Republican. His accomplishments are etched in our history as among the most important and significant made by any leader. He literally failed his way to success.
Failure is a great teacher best met early in life. The earlier you learn to fail and overcome your halfway moments, the longer you and the people you lead will benefit.
MICHAEL F. STALEY, a former firefighter and EMT, is a motivational speaker and heads Port Orange, Florida-based Golden Hour Motivational Resources, through which he also provides consulting and speaking services. He is the author of Igniting the Leader Within (Fire Engineering, 1998).
