Rethinking Failure in Social Impact

This article is a summary of Episode 37 of our Designing Tomorrow podcast. Each episode is a conversation between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler.

We’ve learned to embrace failure as something good. That might seem counter-intuitive, so let’s talk about failure as it relates to social impact.

We’ll start by defining the different kinds of failure. In broad strokes, there are different levels of failure. There's personal failure. There's team failure. Organizational failure. Maybe it's a coalition failure. Maybe it's a mission failure. So there are levels of failure and you don't always have control over what is going to succeed and what is going to fail, depending on the scale. In this article, we're going to mostly talk about personal and team failure.

By and large failure is very hard. But there are some techniques to getting through that. 

Learning Through Failure

We’ve always learned best through failing and the pain of failure and the motivation that creates to not fail again. But also, that can trickle up or bubble up to program failure or organizational failure, or even if we think about the scientific method around how do we learn how the world even works — it’s largely through trying stuff and failing until we don't fail. And so failure is really just built into evolution, our humanity, the way physics and the world and science works at large.

Young kids and they're failing all the time. Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about how a kid jumping in a puddle is really just a physics experiment. Seeing kids fail in all these ways and knowing and being able to recognize in that moment that they're experimenting and they're learning through doing it.

It makes you think about failure as a parent being especially relevant right now, and just every parent experiences failure as a parent or their idea of what it means to be a parent. And it is also really hard. It's really hard to know as a parent how you should act or the choice that you should have made and making a different choice or showing up in a way that's not your best or not how you meant to. And that happens all the time for all parents.

The Outcomes of Healthy Failure

So when you fail and when you've learned to do so in a healthy way, some of the outcomes of that are personal growth, and learning, and personal resilience, kind of that grit factor, that thick skin factor where you're focused on the learning and what to do next and not dwelling in the past. Also at a team level, there's a lot of innovation that can come from failure and being able, more importantly, to look failure in the eye, not just acknowledge failure and move past it, but stand in the mirror and look at this failure and really let it sink in.

The Challenge of Confronting Failure

At Cosmic, this is something we're probably too good at. Sometimes we take it to the point where it can make our team uncomfortable. 

As an example, we do retrospectives on all of our client projects and internal projects. And what we've found is that there's a natural inclination on our team, and in general, to sugarcoat failure and to not bring up failure because it can be perceived as — or might even literally be — a form of criticism. So when we look at our projects and our relationships with clients and we look at what went well and what didn't go well, and we look at where we failed and how we can improve — sometimes  the biggest failures on a project don't get brought up in the retrospective. And leadership has to be the one that brings up the thing we did absolutely the worst on. 

And we've learned that that can also not be constructive unless it's approached in a way that is both transparent but also empathetic, and also graceful, and also constructive in a way that communicates ideas around how we might do better. And in a way that also doesn't put blame on anyone unfairly, or make it feel unnecessarily rude, or nasty, or impolite. And that is a hard balance to strike sometimes, frankly.

It's pretty natural to look at failure, acknowledge it, and just like anything in life, there are a million variables that can go into something being successful or be a failure. And certainly there's an instinct to lean on the things that are out of our control when looking at a failure. And that can be a crutch. “Oh, I couldn't control that. That's why that went awry.” And the harder part is looking at the thing that you do have control of and acknowledging the failure in that sphere. That's what's happening a lot of the times where we're sugarcoating, is we're pointing to the stuff that's kind of out of our control. 

Let's take a pause and also just acknowledge that when it comes to failure at the team level, at the personal level, we are dealing with some really heavy, very important intractable problems in this society.

So what we are talking about here is the kind of failure where the stakes are manageable, the stakes are of the kind where you can learn and grow. We just want to acknowledge that before we get too much deeper.

High Stakes in Social Impact

When you think about a lot of the issues that we are working on in this sector, failure means lives on the line, or people's lives really deeply negatively impacted in certain situations. So sometimes the space is criticized for not being very innovative, being allergic to failure, and there's a good reason for that. As much as we've actually been one of the voices out there criticizing this lack of embracing failure, what we've heard — and it is very valid pushback — is that it's really easy to talk about failure when you're not the one who's failing. It's easy to say, “Oh, the social impact sector needs to be more innovative, be more open to failure. But when you're the one actually failing and failure means you don't get that grant again, or failure means those donors don't think you're an impactful organization anymore, those are high stakes. And we do have some examples of how failure should fit into the space.

Why Failure Is So Hard

Failure is hard. We've talked about the implications of failure in our sector and how the stakes are really high. But there's also just this deeply rooted aversion to failure, and that's just a part of our society, and a part of even how our education system is built, and how we look and how we define success and how we define failure. And there are decades of habits that are built into self-worth and self-perception based on being successful in a very rigid set of terms. 

In school, you get a failing grade, you failed the class. The downstream impacts of that failure are pretty tremendous. Whereas in work, there may be versions of failure where, yeah, you made a mistake, now you can learn from it and we can get better. But there's just, there's this deeply embedded culture of success and failure and specific markers of worth.

The Success Story Bias

In the business world, and by extension in the social impact space, we love to tell stories of success. And what we don't do as much storytelling around is all of the failures that led to that success. Now, in the movies, in the entertainment industry, we love a good failure story or a good challenge, a good obstacle to overcome. That is one of the pillars or the pinnacles of a good story is that transformation, that overcoming of a challenge or a failure. 

But when it comes to our resumes and our impact storytelling and the celebration of leaders — think about Forbes 30 under 30 for example, or who's going to be on the cover of Time Magazine next — we're celebrating these people who have achieved tremendous success either personally or in business or through their organizations. But for a long time, we just talked about the successful parts and what has been achieved, and it's easy to forget that for every success story, there's 10 people who failed trying to do that same thing. And for every success story, that very same person or organization also failed many, many, many times to get to that point of success.

You can read our post on LinkedIn about some of the successes and failures of Cosmic and how we've gotten to where we've gotten today and the place of success. But we had bumps along the way and we had failures. Many bumps. All the time. Still to this day. We’re always working through stuff.

Good Failure vs. Bad Failure

There is good failure and bad failure, and as a leader, there are reasons to accept failure and there are reasons to reject failure. So let's start with the reasons for you as a leader that you are going to accept a failure from yourself or someone on your team. 

1. Failure that enhances team problem solving
2. Failure that leads to smarter risk taking or innovative decision making
3. Failure that can build a collaboration and trust 
4. Failure, that can support growth for those who fear the failure 
5. Failures that can strengthen team bonding. 

These are the flavors of failure that we think leaders are willing to accept. 

Are there failures that you should encourage or want to see happening?

Failure as a Sign of Ambition

We don’t think about failure being positive when it comes to the work that we do for our clients. And maybe that's a mistake. We mostly think about it when it comes to our own growth at Cosmic and our own goals around our vision. One way we think about it is that failing is a sign that you are reaching far enough.

That could be true for activation and marketing work as well. If you are just doing the motions and it's all just kind of gravy and generally humming along, but you're not growing, then that might be a sign that you're not being ambitious enough. 

Every time we've been ambitious and grown, there's been failure that's either inspired that ambition or that's complimented it and pushed us to reach through to that next level.

Our Four-Day Workweek Experiment

In our work, we think a lot about new ideas and approaches that we've taken to how we run things. 

As an example, we've talked about the fact that we do a four day work week. One way that we tried that experiment, and we're going to continue to use the word experiment, it's really relevant to this conversation. At one point, we thought we needed to still hit 40 hours a week for that four day work week to be successful— because that was our assumption.

And what we learned is that that was a failure for us. It works for other people and some people might still prefer that to a standard five day, eight hour day work week. For us, that experiment failed because although we had three-day weekends every week, which was great, we were working long hours — especially in the winter, that was really tough.

We weren't getting that daily recharge, and we did it for a bit. And then after a while we realized this is actually not better. We don't have time for socializing after work. We don't have time to get dinner by the time we're out of work. It's been dark for four hours in the winter. It was brutal.

And so we can look at that in hindsight and say, well, that was a failure. However, it was also a necessary step to realize a really important insight, which is that 40 hours a week is not actually required for us to be effective as an organization. And as we dug into the research on that — and the research on this is fascinating — there is a sweet spot, and it's about 36 hours a week. 32 to 36 hours a week of work and about six hours of work a day. 

And as soon as you go past that, you actually stop being more effective. The return on that time becomes less meaningful. And certainly there are times where you can push, and the team does it sometimes, where you do work longer hours. You do work more days a week, and you can sustain that for a certain amount of time. Probably about six weeks is about the shelf life on that.

The Importance of Correction Opportunities

But we had an opportunity to correct that failure. And that's an important ingredient to good failure or acceptable failure is when you know that there's going to be an opportunity to correct it.

And our correction was not a reversion, and sometimes an aversion might be the right choice. Hey, this is an experiment. We're going to try it and if it fails, we're going to go back to the status quo. There's not necessarily anything wrong with that. 

We chose to continue experimenting and say, well, the 10 hours a day didn't work. What if we did eight and we just didn't work as much? Can we still produce as much creative work and can we still be a viable sustainable business working less hours across the board? We also, in early parts of this experiment, had a split schedule because we had another assumption that someone must be there Friday to answer emails on the phone, culture could not possibly support us not being available on Friday. 

And so we had a split schedule where some of us worked Monday through Thursday and some of us worked Tuesday through Friday. That also failed. And we learned about why that wasn't enough overlap between our team. So we had multiple failures in this experiment, in this mission to figure out how to support a four day workweek culture, because we believed strongly that it was a worthwhile experiment. And there were many failures along the way to get to the point where now we do have a sustainable way of doing that.

Setting Shared Expectations

When making that transition this was something the team was talking about. They understood what was coming. They understood what success looked like. They understood that there was going to be an opportunity to correct if it didn't work. And that's an important ingredient to good failure — where there's a shared expectation of what happens when we fail. Because that's part of the fear.

If it's a black box beyond the point of failure or you don't know what's going to happen. Am I going to get fired? Am I going to get demoted? Am I going to stop getting the good projects? That fear is a strong motivator. And so better not to go out on a limb and take a risk if you don't really know what the consequences are for success or failure on the other side.

Part of this is planning for failure or planning for what failure might look and how we might approach that failure. 

So to continue to use the 4-day workweek as an example, we set it up as an experiment. We timeboxed it. It was about six weeks that we were going to try this — in all of these different phases. And we set the expectation that if we can do this in this six week period and prove that we're still as “productive” and we are hitting our deadlines and our goals and everything, then we will continue the experiment. But if we fail, if we can't do that, no harm, no foul, but we're going to be going back to how things were before or we're going to reassess. So we did plant the seed around what might happen if the experiment failed.

The same thing can be done at a personal level: I’m going to try this thing. What's going to happen if this thing succeeds or fails? And am I going to have a chance to correct it? And also, an important step in all of this is if this is in a professional setting, obviously communicate that to your supervisor or your team, so everybody understands the implications of success or failure for any experiment.

When to Reject Failure

Yeah, there are reasons that leaders or individuals should reject failure. Failure isn't good carte blanche. We're not out here preaching,  “Go fail at everything.”

There are versions of this that leaders shouldn’t accept. For example, here's a few kinds of failures that we do not accept for ourselves or our team:

• Repeated mistakes, especially in high stake situations. It's one thing to make a mistake and to learn from it. It's another thing to continue making that mistake. 
• Failure due to negligence or lack of effort. That is not an acceptable form of a mistake. 
• Mistakes that have legal or ethical implications. That's something that's on leadership to make sure our team understands when making risky choices and to set those boundaries. But we can't be making big mistakes or major failures if there are legal or ethical implications there. 
• Failures that demoralize the team. That's a softer one, but really that comes back to the expectation setting and is this something that we can correct? It's related to the stakes as well. We don't want to have this major experiment that if it fails, it's going to tank the business. 
• Failure that negatively in fact impacts the core mission in a meaningful way. In the course of years that it's going to get us so far off track that we're really doing a disservice to the mission. T

That last one's a little harder to tease out, a little less common.

The Importance of Ownership

The only other one that might be added is if someone tries to place the blame around failure unfairly and won't own it — especially after repeat attempts or discussions. We've had this happen. It's one thing to fail. It's another thing to not own up to that failure. And look, this is hard. This is hard, and we've all done this where we'll pretend, or we'll offset the failure, or push the failure away. But if you don't own the failure, first of all, it's not real. And second of all, you're never going to grow. It's really hard sometimes to even know that you're doing that. It might be subconscious. But something that we will not accept — and certainly there's some grace here — but if over time, someone on our team or that we're working with, or even friends, are failing to come through on a commitment or an expectation or an agreement over and over and over again and they won't own it ,and they won't accept it and they won't try to make an improvement, at some point that’s a deal breaker.

You got to own it. You got to accept it.

Building a Culture That Embraces Failure

What can you do as a team or as a leader to begin to build a team culture where this is actually doable and this is actually livable? It's not something that you can just snap your fingers and it’s going to change overnight. You can't just walk into your next all staff meeting and be like, “All right folks, we're embracing failure. Go.” This, in some cases, can take years to shift organizational cultures, especially if you're in a larger organization. But we have some ideas about how you can do that.

1. Do exactly what we just did, which is to define for your team what are the flavors of acceptable and unacceptable failures.
2. As a leader, especially when it comes to setting cultures, you have to lead by example. You have to name your own failures and how you are correcting them or name your own failures, express to your team when you're going to experiment, and what is going to happen in the case of success and failure —getting ahead of the failure.
3. You need to establish psychological safety as a leader. We're all programmed to fear failure. And one way to establish that psychological safety is to reward transparency over perfection. Celebrate someone who took a risk and celebrate their learning and invite them, if they're so willing, to share what they did, what worked and what didn't, and as a team help them think through it and help them think how we're going to make this better. But you need to begin to celebrate the process of experimentation as much as you do the results.

Permission to Fail

The way we think about this is: permission to fail. Having those guardrails is so important. We mentioned some of them earlier, we don't want failure to lead to ethical or legal issues. We don't want failure to have irreparable disarray for our missions. We don't want anything to happen that's going to be such a big deal that the failure is going to creep into that bad failure category.

Permission to fail. Leading by example, as a leader. We like this reframe away from even potentially even using the word failure and leaning into experiments. The framing and even the cultural background around experiments is the exact right way to think about this. And even the scientific method or a watered-down version of that even is perfectly appropriate for this. And that's the way we think about a lot of the work that we do — even with our clients, but especially in our own growth at Cosmic. We're going to try something. We're going to experiment. And we're going to put some boundaries around that experiment.

We're going to plan for what happens if the experiment doesn't go the way we hoped it would. Even the idea of a hypothesis — we think that if we do this action, it might help result in this result. And we're going to test that because, going back to the MVS framework, that is really an experimentation framework at the end of the day. It is a framework that is highly likely to create failures. And that is part of the idea.

Moonshot Thinking and Responsible Funding

We worked with an organization that was really innovative in the ocean sciences space and partly because they were attached to moonshot thinking. The thing we loved about their approach is that they had a very clear and intentional experimentation framework that had de-risking that was responsible with the funding. They had enough funding that they could do this. And this is something we hope that any funders in the space hear.

You have to be willing to let social impact organizations experiment and fail and to give them that permission. So the same where we're talking about leaders doing this with their organizations, we need funders — and frankly, donors at some level — to be open to that too. Now, that gets a little nuanced because funders have a lot more money than even major donors sometimes. This organization ran experiments in such a great way. They had smaller initiatives, smaller funding — in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — for new experiments and new organizations that were going to give some seed funding and to prove out some of their ideas.

And then once those experiments were run, successful experiments had additional funding unlocked to scale those ideas. Now there are some counter arguments to make about this process. Certain things cannot be scaled down to pilots to test out, for example. But a lot of things can. And the real thing is if we're dealing with these extremely complex, systemic, intractable problems, we have to be willing to experiment. 

The word moonshot even comes from the actual task of taking humans to the moon. What a wild idea. How high were the chances of failure? How many failures had to happen for that to be true in the first place? And there's a huge argument in the space about moonshot placing big bets and doing moonshots and putting a time and attention to that. And critics of that will say, that's all for show and it doesn't really work. And there's all these proven things that we know work that aren't funded fully, and so we should be putting our dollars. 

That's a solid argument to make, but our counter argument is, Yes, and. There is enough wealth and money in this world. We can do both. We need to encourage and hold funders accountable to fund both of those things. And we need a healthy balance of the two. How did those things become proven? Through experiments! They were probably moonshots at one point too. So all of this ties into this idea of being responsibly experimental, and that will breed innovation and true social change over time.

Making Experimentation a Core Value

So we talk about experiments and we set KPIs around experimentation. We hold ourselves accountable to doing the experimenting. We celebrate the funder that is encouraging big experimentation. Experimentation can happen at the smallest task too. Anybody in any job can be experimenting with whatever's in front of them. So as far as creating an organizational culture that celebrates and embraces failure, maybe start using the word experiment. Maybe don't use failure so much.

The Power of Debriefs

Debriefs are a really important component of all of this. Otherwise it's just willy-nilly, wild, wild west.

We can talk about our framework, but another helpful example is the Navy Seals. They call it “After Action Reviews”. It's really deeply ingrained in their culture. And they're doing super high stakes work. They're doing the highest of high stakes work often. And it is very deeply ingrained in their culture that after any action, they do an After Action Review and they have a really transparent, open conversation around what went wrong? Why did it go wrong? What might we do next time? And so that's some of the inspiration for us. 

But the way that we do it is, we send out surveys to everyone on the team with a set of predetermined questions around things you enjoyed, shout outs to other people on the team, what were some friction points in the process. Where do you think there might've been some friction points for the client? These types of questions. 

Everyone fills those out, and then our project manager puts together a report. We have a short conversation around it. And the most important thing is, either in that conversation, or often after that conversation, we develop new working theories or experiments around how we might solve some of these problems. So if all you do is talk about everything that went wrong and then go back to your day to day, that's not effective. It would be bad failing. And so it has to be constructive, which means you have to actually change behavior.

Building Your Failure Resume

Thinking about all of the debriefs that we’ve done at Cosmic, there's an extensive history of failures and wins that have helped us become the team that we are today. 

Here’s an off-the-cuff idea. You might do a team building activity with your team and build out your failure CVs — or a failure resume. Have everyone on your team spend an hour writing down all the things that they did wrong, and the things that they messed up, and the things that they failed at. And then, you do a little learning together. This is another tool that someone might consider using to build that safety and build that expectation that experimentation and failure and success are all part of what we're doing.

The Power of Failure

Embracing failure is a very powerful tool. It's one that's so powerful, you have to wield it carefully, but when you do, it can transform your organization and really help you have the impact you seek.

Check out the full conversation on our Designing Tomorrow podcast.