Are We Really Destigmatizing Failure?

From time to time, our culture throws a word up in the air so that it tumbles around and around like an Olympic diver before hitting the water. And when the word finally lands, it has been magically destigmatized, a change bravely announced — actually insisted upon — by the vanguards of our culture.

We’ve seen this with the word “queer,” a long-time slur, certainly one that my generation grew up with, that has now been tossed into the air and has landed, not only as a positive assertion of non-heterosexual identity, but as a new way to describe the LGBT community beyond an unwieldy alphabet soup.

Some have attempted the same with the “N-word” — not an entirely successful effort in some quarters as you can see from my own (white person’s) reluctance to even write out the word. Similarly, “bitch” is another example, a derogatory description of a woman that has been reframed from time to time as a celebration of assertiveness.

And now we’re seeing it with “failure” — a term that both the business and the social sector are attempting to recast as a badge of honor. Imparting received wisdom from the heavens, where the word presumably traveled after it was flung out into the air, we are told in voices filled with certainty, that it is good to fail. It is a sign of innovation, of an iterative approach, and of that newfangled best practice called design thinking. We are instructed not to think of failure as, well, failing. But instead to think of it as learning so we can improve. We are told that the world’s most successful people have been the ones who’ve failed the most.

So go ahead and be fearless. Court failure.

And if you do, it’s possible that one day you’ll get invited to a new kind of event called a “Fail Fest” where you can proudly showcase your failure for all to see. Applause is guaranteed, sometimes there are even balloons and streamers, especially if your delivery is laced with humor and your PowerPoint is colorful and animated.

In my own profession of philanthropy, this recasting of failure has really caught on. It is our sector’s newest shiny toy. We love it because it is…wait for it…disruptive. And in a way this is true. Admitting our failures disrupts my profession’s longstanding habits of timidity and of spinning everything we do in a positive way to please our boards of directors.

So overall this new perspective on failure is a good thing, right? Hmm, perhaps.

Here’s an example from my own life. I was the last kid on my block to ride a bike without training wheels. I tried a million times to get it right and I fell and I failed over and over.

Finally, one day I got it. Why? Not because I learned from all those falls. No, it was because the kids on my block gathered around me and helped. One of them even told me to remember the mantra from the book, The Little Engine That Could. So as I psyched myself to balance and move forward, I kept saying to myself, “I think I can. I think I can.” And it worked!

Support from others and the power of positive thinking helped me much more than a public confession of my past failures. But, of course, it was only the recognition by my friends that what I was doing on my own wasn’t working that brought them to my side.

Fast forward to my current job where I oversee our evaluation function. Part of my responsibility is to identify what we’ve achieved and what hasn’t gone so well for us. I do this not because I want to single out bad performance or elevate star employees. Instead, I believe that we have to dissect instances where we missed the mark in order to learn and improve. In that regard I’m completely on board with the rationale behind the celebrators of failure. I just don’t like the word.

What we ended up saying instead in our organization is “What’s Working” and “What’s Not Working.” I don’t think it’s sugar coating the situation to describe what’s going on by using other, less critical words.

I like these terms because while they don’t run away from lifting up weaknesses, they do so in a manner that is much more respectful of the work and efforts of our staff. Instead of saying “you failed,” we’re saying “what you tried didn’t work so try something else.” If it were my work on the line, that critique would make me feel a lot better and much more motivated toward improvement.

I’m doubtful that we will ever completely destigmatize the word “failure.” I’m concerned that it’s not a big leap to be told “you failed” and hear it as “you’re a failure.” We easily go there no matter how much our organization or our field is trying to celebrate failing. I just don’t see why we would take that risk with our valued human resources when there are so many other words we can toss up from our lexicon.