Nobody wants to fail. We all want to be sucessful. Many organizations adopt a performance culture and do not tolerate failure – hence everything must become a success. This leads to several challenges:
- ambitious goals and objectives suddenly become baby steps
- toxic intelligence is applied to match KPI’s while the problems remains untouched
- the goals are adjusted close to delivery time
- new things are only tried when it’s clear that they work out
- marketing plays used to turn failure into success
Pseudo success quickly becomes a part of the organizational cultural and triggers a spiral of secondary problems including:
- an increasing complacency
- wasted investments become the justification for future ones
- loss of innovation power and creativity
- demotivating of those trying to solve the root problems
The key issue is however that an organization which falls into this trap of pseudo success starts to operate in a self made pseudo success bubble. Each additional pseudo success starts to build on an already weak foundation making it harder to recognize failure and return back on track.
Please note that this is not a call to end nor a reason to quickly give up, but it is one to accept and learn from failures. Accepting failure is the basis for a fail forward strategy which is the only way to success. Be happy when you and the organization have found an approach which does not work.
At the point when failure is clear it’s the best to accept, learn from it and move on. Be creative – try different things or the same thing in a different way. Just never fail to fail.
FINthinkers 
2 thoughts on “Never fail to fail”