Fear permeates our environment today. We feel its paralyzing presence everywhere. In our personal lives, in our professional lives, in our organizations, fear, especially fear of failure is rising. We are afraid of the risk of making the wrong decision, of not performing, of looking ridiculous in front of others. And yet failure, it seems, is actually the path, the doorway to success. Remember the immense failures of biblical characters like Moses and David and Peter. Yet the failures prepared them and changed them so that they could succeed in the things that God called them to do.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the sage of the modern quality movement, used to implore leaders to “Drive out fear!” in their organizations. He saw fear as a primary obstacle to improvement and change.
The Scriptures in I John 4;18 says,
There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
This morning received a Twitter message from Guy Kawasaki pointing to this exceptional video from Honda, entitled Failure: The Secret to Success. Honda’s message is that we all have had failures personally. And Honda, starting with its founder, has embraced failure as the path forward to success. The video gives insight into the leadership and culture necessary for an organization to be able to do what is so unnatural and antithetical to most corporate cultures.
Take the 8 minutes to view this with your colleagues. Then ask yourselves:
- Why are we afraid to fail?
- How do we handle failure in our organization?
- Where do we need to increase our failure rate?
- Review the successes that came out of failure and the failures that came from being “successful.”
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Comments
Sometimes I fear,…(That word again), that in an effort to be Recognized, Appreciated and being acknowledged as Market leaders, enterprise and their managers devise systems and approaches that are ‘Fail safe’.
The trouble is, life and circumstances are Dynamic and soon someone discovers how to beat the system,…because it is so intimately worshiped and revered, no one really acknowledges it can fail and prepares to manage that risk until its too late. All failures have this as the root cause.
The counterpoint, I think would be to always know that, we can never have perfect and fail safe systems despite the progress of technology, science and knowledge,.
……… once we learn this small lesson, we are well prepared for the big lesson , not of always being on guard against failure, but to remain conscious of what it really means/points to and learn the lessons thereof before the breach becomes too big/systemic.
A great example of this principle in action is Thomas Edison. I had been doing research for an article and found that before he achieved a workable light bulb he failed 10 000 times!! And do you know what he had to say about that?
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Imagine we could see failure in such a light.
Hehe I only watched the clip now…great minds…
GO EDISON!
I agree, Leanne…if only we could all view failure in such a light.
Let us know what you are researching and what your article is about. We’d love to hear more from you.