As product managers at startups, the term fail-fast is often an engrained matra. Facebook used to have the motto, “Move fast and break things.”
Yet handling failure and learning how to “break things” is not something that’s taught in most classrooms. It’s also a topic fresh on my mind because I’ve been experiencing failure.
Failure and negative emotions
When I’m discussing failure, I’m specifically referring to those that conjure negative emotions such as:
Fear
Shame / Embarrassment
Grief / Sadness
Anger
Frustration
Disappointment
Sometimes, the emotions can be so strong where they impede normal function (e.g., difficulty sleeping, can’t concentrate, frozen, lethargic). The type of failure that might trigger this varies for each person. Using cups to illustrate, we can all experience the same failure, but it’ll fill up our emotional glass to different levels.
Now, the problem isn’t the negative emotions themselves. The problem is when these negative emotions inhibits action or increases avoidance.
For example, failure triggers fear (Singh et al., 2007), which causes individuals to either deny or avoid the associated experience (Quinn & Fanselow, 2006) and grief (Shepherd, 2003), which is retrieved or even intensified when entrepreneurs reflect on and analyze the failure experience (Cisler, Olatunji, Feldner, & Forsyth, 2010).
Building resiliency for failure
You can’t remove negative emotions when you experience failure, just as you can’t tell a person not to feel. But, there are techniques you can use to regulate your emotions. I’ll focus on four techniques that you can use to build resiliency.
Acceptance
Experiencing negative emotions is natural. Thus, the first step is acceptance. Even if you don’t like the negative emotion, you can’t run away from it. Acceptance here doesn’t mean you have to embrace the negative emotion, it means being aware of an emotion without judgment (i.e., not good or bad). You can do this with a 3-minute mindful meditation exercise. First, read this statement: “Imagine in your mind as vividly and concretely as possible a ‘movie’ as you fly through the event.” Then, practice a breathing exercise.
Reflection
Reflection can be painful, but it is a systematic process to understand what occurred. Sitting down and writing out your thoughts and feelings,is a one way to reflect. Analyzing the decisions that lead to the failure is another. However, there are several problems that can occur with reflection.
a) If the negative emotions are too painful, reflecting and reliving the events won’t allow you sufficient space to think analytically. You’ll have to come back to this after step 3.b) If you don’t have a process of reflecting, you might focus too narrowly on a particular action or portion of the event that caused the failure. Thus, you might need to use a simple framework, like in retrospectives.
Support
Beyond reflection, sharing your negative emotions and experiences with others (e.g., friends, family, coworkers, therapists) is an way to cope with the emotions.
Product management can sometimes be a lonely activity, especially when it comes to failures. The use of support network has been proven to benefit many people. This is one reason I provide product coaching, as a friendly shoulder to share.
If you don’t know how or are uncomfortable reaching out, a simple technique is to simply ask for help. Here’s an example: [“Hi <name>, I’m recently experience XYZ event. I’m looking to help to talk to you about it and share the experience, to help me gather my thoughts. Would you have xx-minutes where I can talk to you and for you to listen?”]Celebrate
Celebrating failures sounds odd. But celebrating a well-executed failure is an opportunity to give closure and closure is a necessary for you to move forward.
“Likewise, EliLilly's chief scientific officer threw“perfect failure”parties to commemorate excellent scientific work that, nevertheless, resulted in failure (Burton, 2004: 1).”
These celebrations don’t have to be fancy affairs. It can be as simple as blowing out a candle on a cupcake or having a toast at a bar. But it’s important to make it physical, as both a symbol and event. The act of toasting, opening a bottle, or blowing out the cake is the method to bring closure.
In closing
People who are able to manage their negative emotions from failures will be more effective at collecting, analyzing, and learning from their failures. Building skills to increase emotional resiliency will help “keep negative emotions from interfering with learning behaviors”.
Additional Reading:
Successive failure, repeat entrepreneurship and no learning: A case study
Learning from business failure: Propositions of grief recovery for the self-employed
Project failure from corporate entrepreneurship: Managing the grief process
Educating Entrepreneurship Students About Emotion and Learning From Failure