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Embracing the positives of failure

A fear of failure can keep leaders and employees from achieving truly innovative results. Here’s why—and how to create a culture that embraces failure.

By E. Amalia Jansel, PhD

Some of the leading innovative environments are built on the idea that the lessons learned by failure can lead to positive results. One example: At Google X (or just “X,” as it’s currently known), teammates are taught to avoid a fear of failure and openly accept when a project they are working on has failed. In fact, the company of inventors and entrepreneurs gives bonuses to those who acknowledge their projects should be terminated. Instead of trying to salvage time, energy, and resources already invested, they are encouraged to cut their losses, dive into the lessons they learned due to that failure, and then focus on the next idea.

Why reward failure? What Google X has embraced, and what more leaders are realizing, is that failing is a fast way to learn to identify problems, adapt, and make new discoveries so that the problems do not linger or reappear in the next project.

Turning failure into a positive result is illogical for many of us—we’ve been deeply conditioned to have a fear of failure. A range of psychological, environmental, and generational factors tells us to avoid failure at all costs.

However, the most effective executives, educators, and students have learned to deal with their fear of failure, and instead see failure as a way to learn lessons that can allow them grow and improve more quickly.

Before we can change our view of failure, it’s helpful to understand why outsmarting the instinct to avoid failure is so difficult. 

Failure, loss, and our emotions

Our brains are wired to encourage us to avoid failure and loss. For example, here are a few of the areas of the brain that are activated by loss, as well as other emotions for which they are responsible. 

  • The amygdala. This brain region is responsible for detecting and responding to threats and also activates feelings of fear.
  • The insula area. This region of the brain is also connected to feelings of disgust.
  • The striatum region. This is connected to our ability to learn and predict things; it plays a role in helping us avoid losses in the future.

The drive to avoid loss

Humans are typically wired to avoid both actual and perceived failure. This is the idea of loss aversion, first explored in the 1970s by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Their research yielded two fundamental realities:

  1. People react differently to negative and positive changes.
  2. Losses are twice as powerful compared to their equivalent gain.

Today, loss aversion is considered a cognitive bias, making it something that can influence our judgment without our awareness. Other studies have supported the notion that our predisposition to avoiding loss guides our decision-making, partially due to neuropsychological wiring.

At the same time, other factors can influence your perception of failure—and these are crucial for leaders to understand. 

Failure from a position of power

Research has shown that wealthy or powerful individuals are more willing to take risks and generally experience lower levels of loss aversion. If failure does occur, these people rely on their network and preexisting means for support.

This is important for leaders to understand. As a leader, you have more power than your direct reports and are more likely to take risks. Be aware of your position of power in decision-making, and consider that a more hierarchical organization may be priming people in less senior positions to be averse to failure.

Another factor to consider? School. A fear of failure is reinforced throughout our school years, including our college years. Because of this, when recent grads enter the workforce, they may be more loss-averse: Graduates asked to take risks and fail in professional settings can’t make sense of it. As a leader, understanding an employee’s developmental level from a professional standpoint—i.e., where a person is in their professional life—will help you understand how to discuss topics of failure.

How to help your people fail

First, acknowledge that you fail, too. A leader must share and discuss their failures and be open to criticism from throughout the organization. Are you secure enough to hear you were wrong? Be open to that idea and model it. Be willing to be vulnerable, and do it consistently. Acceptance of failure is an opportunity to create a new focus on learning.

Second, set guardrails for experimentation. These parameters can create a psychologically safe environment for failure. Some failures will still be unacceptable, but employees can’t navigate without knowing the boundaries.

Note that the framework you create should align with your mission and purpose. With those in mind, you can strategically outline when failure is an option that can help propel the company forward.

Third, reward failure. Cultivate an environment in which failure, and the lessons learned through failure, is celebrated. This teaches that failure is OK. When we believe we can fail without consequence, we take more risks, and that produces more results. These results reinforce the belief that taking risks and failing provide an opportunity to grow.

It’s a process, so give it time and be consistent. If at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again.