I often check in with an old friend, and we have the most interesting discussions about business and life. One of the most recent conversations led us to the topic of failure and how it is very often culturally seen as a plate of shame with a side of pain.
As always the Chat GPT Version is at the bottom if you want a quick read – I’m verbose 😛
The conversation about ending and failing started a while back with the subject of a startup coming to an end, it failed, and there is nothing more to say about it, or is there? When we started unpacking the events and details that lead to the “end” we quickly found two things, most ends are springboard, and there is a cultural stigma with things ending being failures. This raised some interesting questions, why is an ending very often seen only as a painful failure? Why are ends defined differently for different entities?
To understand the questions we need to define the end. Well, an end is defined based on perspective. From a time perspective, it’s the final moment of something. From a space perspective, it’s the further extent of something. From a life perspective, it’s a bit of both. But essentially it’s just the extent of either time or object, there is no inherited failure attached to an end. It is our cultural programming that defines the moment of or just after an end as something specific. It’s that “thing” that is constructed after an end that is often judged as a failure and it’s for some reason not inspected separately from the end. A heavily prejudiced view substantiated by our cultural programming.
If you think about it, an end in and of itself doesn’t constitute a failure, it’s just a point in time or space with a flag stuck in. I like to look at life as a series of strings with flags in them, things you can clearly remember and go back to, not always pleasant but useful. Every start and end is recorded in a series of flags, and these flags become important reference points for making better decisions later. A collection of data points to make better decisions. and this is the start of defining and questioning your personal fail culture. Retrospecting on these flags can be painful, to say the least, it is hard for anyone to look at their past, especially the “not-so-nice parts” and evaluate them. Sometimes you look back at a Red-Flag over time and it may change to yellow or dare I say green. This is the effect of time over experience. The ends change colour because your programming reevaluates the events.
Let’s look at things ending. For example, when someone changes jobs, it’s rarely seen as a failure, in fact, it is more often than not celebrated as a new adventure with well-wishes, promises of drinks and hopes that there may be a future collaboration, all very positive intents. But the person still ended their relationship with an entity, with many of the people, with projects, which means something failed to keep them in the relationship. We don’t often see it this way, well maybe there is a manager somewhere brave enough to admit to it. We often celebrate people taking new jobs or moving to a new town, starting a business all of this at the cost of something else ending – an existing job, relationships, stability the list goes on, but we rarely see this as a failure, we celebrate instead. We seem to have a positive collective fail culture for individuals. This is but one example.
So why do we treat an entity’s failure so differently? Take a business that fails, there is so much attention given to the failure of the business, investigating, understanding, and learning how to avoid failure. But I have rarely seen people celebrating its achievements and learning from those as positive ways forward. The achievements just don’t match up in magnitude to the failures and this is cultural programming at work. A business failing is treated as something to mourn and be ashamed of, but why? I’m not ignorant here, a business failing affects far more people than just one. Here is a more tangible example. A ship sinking does not negate the brilliance it took in designing, building and piloting the ship. A lot of good stuff happened in the lifetime of that ship. However much has been learnt from sunken ships but most of the focus is on avoiding the next one sinking. It takes people with a very different failure culture to look at a ship, celebrate its engineering achievements and improve on them. Not only to avoid failure but to progress in nautical engineering, ships are on my mind today.
Hindsight is 20:20 vision. I look back to my childhood and how things have changed, how my failure culture was established and the cultural programming ingrained. My parents worked jobs for 20-plus years - got the watches, retired, all while paying taxes, getting a house raising some kids - good job!? But anything that didn’t look this way was weird and weird is bad and the easiest way to get someone to perform is to make them afraid of failing. I have rarely stuck with a company for more than 24-ish months – of late it’s gotten better, going on 5 years where I am now. But in my relatively short career, I’ve worked at many places. One of them was a failed startup. I mourned all those endings – none of them was celebrated because I never left because I wanted to it was because I needed to and that felt like a failure.
The significance of cultural programming. My cultural experience, and my experience in many of the cultures I have been fortunate enough to be exposed to, the past and present collide in a misaligned view of endings and failures. We were raised to retain at all costs, put up, shut up, head down, and work hard. Avoid failure at all costs, bad things happen when you fail. I can do “work hard”, the head-down and shut-up thing I have a difficult time doing and that has provided me with some fantastic endings and learning opportunities. Yet knowing that I am not a head down, shut up kind of person, and that it’s ok not to be provided that you remain respectful, did not quench the burning pain of “my programming telling me” that in some way I failed, that it was my fault, that there must have been something I could have done or said. Reflecting on an end or failure is a healthy thing it is how we learn, but having a negative failure culture programmed into you makes this a very difficult if not impossible task to accomplish. The programming dishes out a wonderful cocktail of doubt and self-loathing with a splash of depression and a dash of anxiety coming together to completely kill off the opportunity for learning and healthy retrospection. So much of this behaviour could be avoided and channelled in a far more positive way if the cultural programming around failure changes. We could look at all the ships we have ever been involved with, with a completely different perspective.
The strange thing is looking back at it all now, all the ships I helped build or pilot or just worked on, some ships still going strong, some ships that have sailed their last voyage ages ago. But I try my best to see it for what it is, flags in a pinboard of decisions, a series of schools and springboards. It’s not easy to look at endings and failures this way, cultural programming is not easily broken, I still feel the pain but I choose to focus on the opportunities to improve and practice kindness, especially to myself. A positive failure culture and kindness means failures no longer leave my desk lamp dark, unable to study and learn. It’s painful but I can study and it starts with acknowledging that endings are emotional, that you need to take responsibility for your part in it and being kind is cool. The programming is strong and that’s ok, you won’t break it completely, but you can foster a more positive culture for yourself and others. Start by kindly asking the question “What did I contribute to this situation?“
Here lies the opportunity to push forward positively. In endings and failures, it starts with kindness and a focus on opportunities to improve. It already hurts, there is no reason to point out failures for any other purpose than to learn. I for example have an opportunity to programme my kids far better than I was programmed, to look at endings as pinpoints in a decision board and nothing more than that. Focus on endings as a point in time that needs to be investigated, learnt from, taken responsibility for and used as a position to launch off into the next direction. I have an opportunity to help re-program myself and the people around me with a positive failure culture. In my line of work focusing on recovery from failures is far more important than understanding who was responsible. We still need to know who was involved, and that there are still consequences, but we don’t have to witch hunt in fear we can support accountability with kindness. It’s not about changing the world, if enough people make small changes it really does make a difference and being kind is easy.
Never forget that the current failure culture means that endings can be painful, debilitating and permanent. I encourage people to treat failure with kindness and a focus on improvement, to remember that you are never truly alone, and to reach out. A kind hand in a time of need can save a life.
The CHAT GPT VERSION: Musings of a wandering mind: When does an end become a failure? Our culture has ingrained this belief deeply.
I regularly engage in insightful discussions with an old friend on business and life. Our recent conversation delved into the cultural perception of failure, which is often viewed as a shameful and painful experience. We explored how endings, especially in the context of a failed startup, are frequently stigmatized as failures, raising questions about why conclusions are predominantly seen as negative and how they differ for individuals and entities.
To understand these questions, we examined the concept of an “end” from different perspectives—time, space, and life. We concluded that an end, in itself, does not inherently imply failure; it is our cultural programming that attaches a negative connotation to what follows an end. Reflecting on life as a series of flags representing significant points, we highlighted the importance of these flags as reference points for making informed decisions and challenging the notion of failure.
While societal norms often celebrate individual transitions like changing jobs, they tend to stigmatize business failures. We observed a positive collective “fail culture” for individuals but questioned why the same attitude is not extended to entities. Drawing parallels to a ship’s lifetime, we emphasized the importance of acknowledging achievements and learning from failures for positive progress in various fields.
Reflecting on personal experiences and cultural influences, we explored how cultural programming shapes our views on endings and failures. The significance of cultural programming in fostering either a negative or positive failure culture became evident. We acknowledged the difficulty in breaking free from ingrained cultural beliefs but emphasized the power of adopting a positive failure culture for personal growth.
In conclusion, we recognized the opportunity to reshape our perspective on endings and failures by focusing on kindness, taking responsibility, and viewing them as opportunities for improvement. We encouraged fostering a positive failure culture, not just for oneself but also for those around us. The narrative underscored the importance of treating failure with kindness, seeking support, and challenging the prevailing negative culture to create a more compassionate and understanding society.
Mind, on the rocks?! 