Issue link: http://psai.uberflip.com/i/1280285
ASSOCIATIONINSIGHT Portable Sanitation Association International News BIWEEKLY EDITION AUGUST 19, 2020 Page 9 Continued on page 10 Fail Is a Four-Letter Word…But Should It Be? Nobody likes to mess up. Mistakes cost time and money. Our egos get bruised—if not from our smart-aleck little sister ribbing us or our small business banker calling our loan, then from the self-talk we give ourselves. Guess what? It turns out not messing up has its downsides too. Now, we don't mean to go all "pop psychology" on you, but it seems errors are important for success. We've all heard about Thomas Edison's hundreds of attempts to find the right filament for his first light bulb. He famously said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." What's good enough for old Tom should be okay for us too, right? We're not experts on the topic of the good that comes from failing, but there are people out there who are. Lia DiBello, President, CEO, and Director of Research at a company called WTRI (Workplace Technologies Research Inc.) wrote the following blog post about the importance of trying and messing up. We'll let Lia take it from here. The High Cost of Failing to Fail A lot of my research and my company's work revolves around understanding the role of failure in accelerated learning. Whenever I try to explain to people how this works, I encounter considerable misunderstanding and overwhelming fear of failure. This is unfortunate; iterative trial and error is the only way to reach the highest levels of skill and fear of failure is possibly the most crippling force in companies trying to innovate, or even remain current. Fear of failure is actually a recipe for dramatic demise for businesses. No one would expect an athlete to run a four-minute mile the first time they tried or an Olympian to win a gold medal as a result of pre-planning on spreadsheets and a risk study. Doing it and doing it wrong, getting feedback and iterative refinement leads to success. The same is true for concert pianists, artists, or scientists. These professions accept that setting a goal and iterative trial and error is the path to advancing your game. At the same time, many highly accomplished people in business—when asked how they developed the instincts of success—will tell stories about difficult challenges and how they were overcome through trial and error. More to the point, they are highly aware of how these challenges made them who they are. Then why in business, is failure is something to be avoided at all costs? Failure is associated with shame, embarrassment and political suicide. Managers feel pressure to appear confident, all-knowing, or even clairvoyant. And yet cognitive scientists know that this flies in the face of what is required to be truly accomplished. In truth, managers fear disasters. Embracing failure is actually a way to avoid disasters.