Tag Archives: failure

Starting Over

If you don’t succeed should you give up or start over.  Giving up smacks of failure and so from a motivational perspective many would say try again (in essence, start over).

From a conscious logical analysis both approaches could be best depending on the cost benefit situation.  There is a time when giving up is best and a time when starting over, perhaps with a different approach,will bring the best results.

Emotional Baggage

Many of our decisions are strongly influenced by our unconscious thought processes.  In fact a number of behaviour studies have shown were we to focus exclusively on our conscious thinking decisions would often just not get made.

Our emotional bias together with our innate integrity and self-absorption will often form overriding influences preventing us from giving up.

From a pure logic perspective this can cause us to persevere beyond what a reasonable analysis  would dictate as appropriate.  Continuing when success is unlikely has little value but often we will do it anyway.

Keep Your Perspective

The impacts of failure can be amplified when you continued to strive against insurmountable obstacles with little hope of overcoming them.

Lack of success is not necessarily bad.  Treating the need for a positive outcome as an absolute necessity can lead to  damage to your psyche.

Some failures are inevitable and treating them as such, even embracing them, moving on and starting over can be without reservation is sometimes the only good option.

 

 

 

Incremental Strategy

Projects can be executed in a variety of defined approaches.  Waterfall being an sequential approach and agile being iterative, or variations of each of these are the most common practices.

Similar approaches can be applied to both creation and execution of an organizations strategy.   Strategies are just plans to achieve defined objectives.

Defining Objectives

The first step in any strategy is to define the goals and objectives.  Simply put what is the strategy intended to achieve.  These can be can cover one or many topics for example; financial, repetitional, risk aversion, resource focused and so on.

In a waterfall approach to strategy the objectives are determined first and then the plans to achieve them.  An iterative approach could be better defined as an incremental strategy.

We will figure it out

Incremental approaches to strategy appear at first to be contradictory to the definition.  Strategies are plans and incremental plans seem almost not to be plans but rather just acting in the moment.

It’s a Framework!

While strategies clearly identify what success is, that is when you reach the strategic objective you are successful.  If success is identified in an iterative way, are you not just making it up as you go along.

Of course yes that is the intent of both a project executed iteratively and and strategy approached this way.  The benefit is the ability to mold the ongoing goals according to what make sense at the time.

Rather than committing to a 3 to 5 year strategic plan the committment is to a framework which is reviewed, balanced and corrected iteratively as it makes sense to do so.

Don’t just laugh out loud at iterative strategies, there is some method to the madness.

 

How or What?

We all do things every day. These things range from waking up, eating to a multitude of other activities.  For example  working for monetary compensation or for non monetary motivations.

Two basic attributes can be applied to everything we do.  What are we doing and how are we doing it?  Obviously where, when and why can be important to some degree but what and how must also be known and always come into play.

Concious versus Unconcious

Often what we are doing and how we make it happen occur withput much thought.  We wake up after sleeping (the what) and it could be a concious action with an assist from an alarm clock or it could just be our unconcious internal clock causing us to awake.

Taking control of what you do and how it is accomplished is a critical aspect of personal success.  Deciding what to do based on a well considered motivational understanding is more likey to result in the outcome you desire.

While happy accidents do occur, taking charge of your destiny means there is no need to rely on the roll of the dice.  Whether the out ome was  good or bad, you thought it through.

Doing the Right Things

The message of this post is simple.  If you know waht you are trying to do (the goal or objective) you can plan for success.  If you plan for success and excute the plan effectively the risk of failure is greatly mitigated (although not removed, failure is always an option).

 

 

Celebrating Failure

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).