One of my close relatives works at a tech startup that is undergoing a drastic pivot. The reason for the pivot is that the core business model became unsustainable. It became unsustainable because of sector-wide problems that threw the entire industry into chaos but brought this company to the financial brink. The company was already on thin ice. Protected by obscene amounts of investor capital, they failed to execute their core business effectively because they refused to make plans and stick to them, and because they refused to focus on fixing problems. They had, in some ways, fetishized failure claiming, “We are learning as we go.” But, as it turned out, they rarely learned from failure, and when things got rough, they had to lay off almost every single employee just to keep the lights on.
Intelligent organizations don’t stigmatize errors and do a great job learning from them. The problem is that failure is only good insofar as an organization implements the needed reforms to make things better in the future. If problems occur and no one takes accountability for fixing things, then nothing gets fixed. The company would routinely make massive mistakes that would cost them millions and they would learn nothing. They learned nothing because leaders were afraid to take accountability, hesitant to hold others accountable, and too lazy to put in the work necessary to dig into problems and implement solutions.
The insight that failure and errors are precious to an organization has been abused by chronically lazy and cowardly leaders who want an easy excuse for all of their personal failings and the failings of the organizations they lead. When things go wrong they say, “It’s okay to fail because we are learning” and then nothing else happens. The irrational love of errors for the purpose of avoiding the responsibilities of leadership is something I call “Failishizing1.”
…That’s Failishizing™—send me 25 cents every time you use it, or you’ll get a nasty letter from my lawyer!
Now, this may seem at odds with one of the bedrock essays of this newsletter— Failceeding—but it is not. Failceeding is about preventing subordinates from feeling helpless by making them feel the consequences of failure and then coaching them toward success. Yes, failure should be encouraged, but for the sole purpose of improving over time. If you are not learning and improving, then you are just straight-up failing. Failceeding is like a vaccine that trains your immune system to fight off disease. But failishizing is like sitting on the couch eating potato chips all day and saying, “This bad food will stress my system and will make me healthier.”
Failishizing is the process of not doing any due diligence to prevent unnecessary failure, doing no analysis and holding no one accountable for failure, proclaiming that failure is good, saying that learning is occurring when it is not, and then repeating that cycle over and over until the enterprise collapses.
It’s not a surprise that Failishizing can only occur within a certain type of organization. It certainly isn’t something that happens in industries that require a high degree of compliance. On my second deployment to Afghanistan, I worked with a National Guard officer whose day job was as a safety and compliance inspector for oil and gas operations. The stories he would tell me were wild. Failure in that industry usually means that someone is either killed or seriously injured. Protocols are in place for a reason and are usually followed by the majority of people on a daily basis. And they know they are taking risks when they deviate from guidelines. And failure management looks like in-depth investigations, re-examinations of protocols, and firing supervisors who failed to uphold safety standards. No manager or executive comes out to address the company and says, “Heyyyyyyy team, sooooooo I know we’re all really bummed that Johnny got crushed to death by a 4-foot-wide concrete pipe, but it’s OH-kay because I think we’ve all learned some valuable lessons.” There are plenty of failures in that kind of industry, but there is no failishizing.
This goes back to my essay on errors where I talked about the importance of feedback from the operating environment. In industries that are in direct contact with reality, you get very little Failishizing behavior. In that type of industry, you either learn quickly from failure and adapt, or simply won’t survive in that industry. A NASCAR pit crew has an extraordinarily thin margin for error if they want to remain at that level. They practice, and practice, and practice. The best organizations are the ones where the members police themselves, aren’t afraid to police those around them, and aren’t afraid to be policed by those around them.
When reality becomes too distant to be felt, and there is no feedback from the environment, there is no forcing function to hold people accountable and force them to deal with failures and errors. Failishizing can continue because there is no pressure to fix problems.
Military units struggle with this constantly. When there is no war, there is no outside pressure to force units to learn and adapt. We have many excellent training events that provide great opportunities for learning, but even during these training events units can fail and leaders can Failishize. In the absence of outside pressure, it is up to leaders to apply that pressure to their organizations — to push them to the brink of failure and then force them to learn and adapt. Obviously, this can be overdone and examples of commanders going too far abound. But military leaders should not overlook errors just because there are no real-world consequences for mistakes made in training. Nor should leaders try to fix everything themselves. The formula for success that I have seen work is to pull the thread on a problem until you really get to the bottom of it, then gather the right people who are closest to the problem and enable them to fix it.
Failishizing is part of a larger trend that I continue to see in the super-soft-LinkedIn-bumper-sticker style leadership advice that’s out there, where how you treat people is the only thing that matters, regardless of the results. And, according to this school of thought, there is only one way to treat people: nicely. Yes, you should treat people as best you can, but results matter, people! Winning Matters!
If you want to be the best, you shouldn’t be competing for the world’s nicest boss award. Apply pressure when it’s appropriate and hold people accountable!
Too slow! Do it again!
“That’ll get ‘em going”
People too often forget that, sometimes, leadership is about applying pressure to get compliance.
We’ll expand on this more in the coming weeks.
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Fetishizing failure.