Seems odd to celebrate failure, in fact there is a lot of strong rationale for this practice.

What is failure

There can be a few nuances to the definition of failure, for the purpose of this discussion let’s view it as not achieving the desired or intended objective.

Success is basically the opposite, that is achieving the desired or intended objective.

Both success and failure have an associated order of magnitude.  Sometimes they can be very close.

For example, the objective could be to make revenue of $100,000 in a given month.  If the actual revenue is $98,000 the goal was not achieved (failure) while revenue of $102,000 exceeded the goal (success).  In the overall scheme of things there is not much difference in this performance.

Failure does not sound good, why celebrate?

Although Yoda (a deeply philosophical character from the Star Wars movies) states “there is no try, do or do not”; and it sounds good, the reality is if you don’t try you are almost assured neither do nor do not states will be achieved.

Celebrating failure has an interesting ring to it and usually get’s peoples attention when I talk about it.  The intent is to recognize the attempt.  Recognition has been demonstrated in numerous physiological tests to be an effective motivator, a way to encourage repetition of a behavior.  Celebrating failure is just a form of recognition (read on …..)

Setting a stretch goal, should result in failure more often than not – I would argue it’s hard to classify as a stretch goal if you can always attain it.   So we should all fail on occasion.

Acknowledging, recognizing, even encouraging the behavior that led to the failure provides reinforcement of the effort.  Although it’s a simplistic statement, consider; “if you did not make the attempt it’s unlikely you will achieve the desired result”.

Motivate through recognition

In a leadership role I often hosted team sessions to review and discuss results, both bad and good (i.e., success and failure) to encourage a continued drive toward achievement.  To be clear, these were never about criticism or what went wrong, but as Mary Poppins sang – “accentuate the positive”.

The results spoke for themselves.  Instead of failing which can demotivate and result in a downward spiral (losing teams continue to lose) concentrating on the positive aspects stopped the downward slide (it’s not bad, it’s really good and here is why).