Using Failure to Succeed

I met a lady at a networking event who was looking at the book, Money on the Table, Referrals in the Bank, by Dr. Ivan Misner and Lee Abraham, and recently contains a Special Section that I wrote, The Relationship Maturity Model.  She shared that she would like to write a book, Plan for Failure.  She mentioned that you can buy a million self-help books concerning planning for success but no one has written one advising planning for failure.  I immediately understood what she meant; I have many, many hours of project management training and experience and what makes a project truly successful is one that comprehended failure through risk analysis and on the strength of the resultant risk mitigation plan.  In other words, when planning a project, examine what can go wrong at each step and plan mitigating actions to prevent failure and monitoring steps to catch when the project immediately as it goes off the plan so you can have maximum time to recover.  Remember that a project plan has three dimensions:  Time, budget, and results.  All three must be planned for and achieved per that plan for the project to be successful.  Additionally, all three must be taken into account as we examine risks at each step:

• What can occur to cause this step to NOT come in on time?
• What can occur to cause this step to NOT come in on budget?
• What can occur to cause this step to not achieve the expected results?
• What actions can we take to make prevent these occurrences or to compensate if they do occur so we can achieve the desired results?

Employing this for our businesses
So how do we Plan for Failure for our businesses?  Here are some steps:

1. For each project, task set, production run, service offering, event, or any other important occurrence, evaluate the impact if it isn't on time, on budget, or meeting the expected results.  If the impact in minimal, then just do it.  If the impact is critical, then continue
2. Develop the plan, including the three W's for each step - WHO is responsible for doing WHAT, and WHEN.  Writing it down is key to assuring success
3. For each step, brainstorm what can go wrong with respect to Measurements, Materials, Method, Environment, Manpower, or Machine (see Cause and Effect Analysis) 
4. For each item identified that could go wrong, identify what can be done to eliminate the potential problem, what can be done to identify that the step is going wrong, and how to monitor to make sure the step is on track. 
5. Prioritize the mitigation steps

What about personal failures?  Follow the steps above as well!  This is planning for failure.

Using Failure to Succeed
Of course, you want to do everything you can NOT to fail.  However, it happens.  The key is to do everything you can to avoid failure and minimize the impact (through the above process), and then move on when it happens.  Here's how to do that.

Cut and run
The first thing to do is admit failure.  To whom?  Most importantly, yourself.  Many people hang onto their present course of action much too long and commit more time and effort, hoping things will turn around, versus declaring a loss and moving on.  Avoidance, in most cases, just makes the loss in the failure greater and delays getting back on course.  A "cut and run" strategy reduces the impact and speeds recovery.

If you're not failing, you're not learning - nor living up to your potential
There's safety in never exceeding limits.  However, a conservative approach - working well within the safe boundaries - sometimes can mean mediocre results.  Pushing limits can mean growth and excelling. This doesn't mean taking stupid risks, but includes planning for those risks (per above).  Additionally, developing a habit of learning from failures - analyzing what went wrong and then implementing actions to not repeat the failure based on the learning - is very valuable. 

Make the failure public
Selectively, tell others about your failures.  After admitting the failure to yourself, next share with others who are strategic business partners - those who care about you and from whom you can get business advice.  But don't just share the failure; share your learning and actions you are implementing to not repeat the failure.  Saying all this out loud makes it real.  Sharing it with others drives your commitment.

Share your story with your clients.  By sharing the story of how you got to where you are and what you do, you drive credibility.  Caution: This only works if you have learned and implemented the actions to avoid repeating mistakes!  However, taking this step means you will have your learning down very well!