How To Turn Failure Into Success: The Power Of Accelerated Learning

Recovering from Failure | GETTY

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to change and innovation is not lack of ideas, resources, or time, but simply the fear of failure. Recognizing this, many leaders have asked me: how can we learn to accept failure? It’s not an easy task, especially since we have been trained to be afraid of failure in life, school, and business. Yet, paradoxically, every one of us also recognizes that failure is part of the learning journey and that some of our best lessons come from failure. So how then can we learn to tolerate or even embrace failure?

Recently we sat down with one of the great mavericks of the modern innovation scene: David Hieatt, co-founder of Hiut Denim, the DO Lectures, and Howies. He shared sage advice from a long and brilliant career as an innovator and change maker:

“One of our human needs is certainty, the other human need is uncertainty,” David explains. “We have certainty. We follow formulas. That’s what they are for. But trying new things is to develop new formulas for the future. There's definitely a need for a framework and I think most companies, most people try and actively shy away from it.”

But to develop new formulas means we must develop “the willingness to be wrong, accepting that we may fail at this.”

How then can we overcome that fear of failure? David explains what guided him in becoming a top advertising executive and later launching several of the world’s most successful new brands: “I never looked at [failure] as anything other than learning.”

He continues, “when people say, oh yeah, I've failed at that, … no, you've learned. When you reset: it's not failure, it's learning, then you just ask, why wouldn't you want to learn? But for some reason, a lot of people attach failure to a stigma. But you would never say, well, accelerated learning is a stigma? No, it's a gift. And once you start looking at it as a gift, you ask: Why honestly wouldn't you want to do that?”

One of the ways to transform failure into a “gift,” and ease your fear of failure is to back up and reimagine the task itself: break the big risks down into smaller risks, a principle we confirmed in our independent research in The Upside of Uncertainty. But David added a spin of his own: take baby steps towards the goal by making it part of your daily practice.

He illustrates with the example of Colin Greenwood, the bass player behind Radiohead, one of the biggest bands in the world. When Colin spoke at the DO Lectures, everyone wanted to know how Radiohead had become so successful. Part of it was their egalitarian collaboration: “there's four or five members in the band, but they'd come together and they'd all have different inputs” Put the bigger part, David argued, was their daily practice of learning and improving. “They had to do the work. People see them headlining in front of Glastonbury with a hundred thousand people. They don’t see that before that they were doing the two dollar a night gig and they were doing their practice. Even when Colin was being driven home from the DO Lectures, he was asking, ‘oh, put Radio 6 on and let’s see what's going on.” As David pauses to emphasise “how well you do your daily practice is how good a thing becomes. That’s where it becomes really interesting.”

If you could apply David’s advice to shift your focus to how to learn as quickly as possible, and take baby steps to resolve the uncertainty, we could be much more successful in embracing the uncertainty, and sometimes failure, that comes with discovering new and better ways to do everything.

As David underscores, “the framework is about the baby steps. People want to take the big giant leap, but actually when you add up all the baby steps, they get you absolutely where you want to get to.”

As our conversation ended, he emphasized: “Staying within your formula will get you to a good business. But when you start eating your formula and cannibalizing it, that will probably get you to a great business. The problem is at the time when you're cannibalizing some of your best ideas, it feels like the wrong thing to do, because you worked so hard to get there. But you've got to start surprising yourself and when you do that, you surprise your customer too.”

Key Insights from David Huit:

• To overcome your fear of failure, reframe it for what it truly is: accelerated learning

• Break bigger risks of failure into baby steps, so each step is less frightening and any “failure” easier to absorb

• A daily practice of committed, accelerated learning is the best path to success