Latest / The Thriving School Podcast with Jenni Awesome / How to Fail Forward: Why Failure Is the Key to Growth, Leadership & a Better Tomorrow
Transcript
- Jenni Awesome: I want to start today by completely dismantling a question we've probably all heard. What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail? You've heard that one, right? It's on motorba motivational posters, it's on coffee mugs, it's probably written over a picture of somebody jumping off a cliff into the ocean at sunset. Yeah, and I understand what the question is trying to accomplish. Dream bigger. Stop letting fear control you. Imagine what's possible. I love all of that. But there's one problem. You can fail. I can fail. We will fail. You can start the business and nobody buys anything. You can apply for the dream job and get the rejection email. You can pour everything into a presentation and walk out thinking, well, that was terrible. You can try an incredible new lesson with your students and have 30 teenagers stare at you like you've lost your mind. You can start a podcast and nobody listens. You can post the video three likes. And what is your mom? Thanks, Mom. Hi mom. You can create the non profit, write the book, pitch the idea, and ask somebody out. Go back to school. Run for something. Start the program. Launch the product. Make the phone call. And it can fail. So I think excuse me. So I think there's a much more powerful question, and it's this. What would you attempt if you knew you could survive failure? Hmm. Not avoid it. Survive it. Learn from it. Use it. Maybe even become better because of it. What would you try then? What would you finally say? What would you build? Where would you apply? Who would you call? What dream would you take off the shelf? What conversation would you have? What would you stop wasting? What would you stop waiting for permission to do? Who would you stop waiting for permission to be? Because maybe the thing keeping us from possibility isn't actually failure. Maybe it's what we've decided failure means about us. Welcome to a better tomorrow is possible. I'm Jenni Awesome, And today we're going deep into one of the foundational ideas behind my work through Awesome Consulting and Educational Services. Fail forward. And I don't just want to give you another motivational speech about getting back up. I want to talk about why we're afraid to fail, where we learned it, what failure does to leadership, what it does to schools, what it does to organizations. What failure does to relationships, how it helps innovation, and what it does to purpose. And most importantly, how do we create cultures where human beings are courageous enough to try? Because if we're serious about building a better tomorrow, we're gonna get some things wrong. And I'll tell you what, here's something strange. Here's something really strange. Here's something strange about our culture. We love failure stories. But only after the person succeeds. Think about almost every inspirational story you've heard. Someone says, I got rejected forty-eight times. The audience. Wow! My friend. First three businesses failed. Amazing. Nobody believed in me. Incredible. I had seventeen dollars in my bank account. So inspiring. But rejection number thirty-two, not inspiring. It hurts. When the business is actually failing, not inspiring. When the bank account is actually empty, not inspirational. When you're watching something you believed in not work, that doesn't feel like a TED talk, that feels awful. We love failure retrospectively because once we know the ending, failure becomes part of the hero's journey. But when you're standing in the middle of it, you don't know the ending. And that's the part we don't talk about enough. You don't know whether the next application will be the one. You don't know whether version four will work. You don't know whether people will eventually understand your ideas. You don't know whether you're supposed to persevere or pivot. And that uncertainty is difficult. So I want to take a moment to separate two sentences today. I failed at something, and I am a failure. Those are not the same statement. One of those statements describes an event. One defines a human being. And somewhere along the way, many of us learn to turn outcomes into identities. I failed the test. I'm stupid. I wasn't selected. I'm not good enough. My business didn't work. I'm terrible at businesses. My marriage ended. I'm incapable of relationships. My classroom is chaotic. I'm a terrible teacher. My kid is struggling. I'm a terrible parent. My organization isn't growing. Nobody wants what I have to offer. Do you see what happens? We start with data. Then we turn the data into a story. Then we turn the story into an identity. And once failure threatens identity, risk becomes terrifying. Because now I'm not protecting the project, I'm protecting myself. So I'm an avid knitter and crochet. I actually have here. This is my detail stretch unicorn that I made. And I saw the most amazing sweater online. It had this like elf hood and it was long and magical and mystical and I found it. I could go ahead and get the pattern online and make it myself. I knew exactly how to do it. Started making the pieces. I'm like, they seem a little big. I'll just keep going. It'll be fine. And I'm only five foot five. So I spend months making all the pieces for the sweater. I put it all together. It is built for like a seven foot tall man. It was huge. it was massively the wrong size, the wrong thing to make. And I failed at that sweater. Like I didn't even want to wear it because I failed so poorly. I really thought that it was going to be the perfect, most amazing sweater. I thought I did everything right. and I failed. so I actually ended up, I think it went to goodwill. but that was a time where I had an opportunity to do something well, really be involved with all the details, and I failed. And it wasn't that I was a failure, I still think I'm a fantastic knitter and crocheter. I just didn't understand the the logistics of that pattern and the way that that yarn. was going to work up. So Before we go any further, I want you in this conversation, come find me @msjenniferawesome and answer one question. What would you try if you weren't afraid of failing? One sentence. Don't give me the practical version. Give me the thing that immediately popped into your head before your brain started explaining why you can't do it. Send it to me. And if you're finding yourself thinking, these are my people. I want more these conversations. Join the community directly. Awesomeconsulting.org/subscribe. We're talking about people, possibilities, and progress, and I want this to become a community that actually tries things. Alright. Think about babies for a minute. A baby learning to walk is basically one continuous failure experiment. Stand, wobble, fall, stand, fall, grab table, fall, take step, fall. Cry. Try again. And no sane adult watches that and says, I just don't think walking is your thing. Nobody says, have you considered staying with crawling? And we understand instinctively that the fall is part of the learning. The kid's brain is collecting information, balance, muscle, distance, coordination. Every attempt changes the next attempt. Children learn language in the same way. They say words incorrectly. Adults laugh affectionately. We correct them. They try again. They draw terribly. They sing loudly and often terribly. They build things. They make up games. They ask ridiculous questions. They're constantly experimenting, and then something changes. At some point we begin teaching children that being wrong carries social consequences. Think about a classroom or daycare. Kindergarten. Who knows the answer? Twenty hands. Half of them don't even know the questions. Middle school, who wants to answer? Everyone suddenly is fascinated by the floor. What happens? They learned. Being wrong in public can hurt. Someone might laugh. The teacher might correct me. My grade might go down. People might think I am stupid. So now there's a safer strategy. Don't try. And adults do this too, sometimes. not try and protect our identity. Because if I don't write the book, I can always believe I could have written a great book. And if I write it and nobody d if I write it and nobody buys it, now I have data. If I don't apply for the position, I can tell myself I probably would have gotten it. If I apply and get rejected, well now I have an answer. If I never start the company, I can imagine, I can keep imagining what an incredible entrepreneur I might have been. That's why procrastination isn't always laziness. Sometimes it's protection. If I never fully try, I never fully fail. And that's a brutal bargain Because avoiding failure also means avoiding possibility. Alright, let's talk about one of my favorite things, perfectionism. Because perfectionism gets praised, and I'm just a perfectionist, which I am sometimes. Depends on the product. The project. It sounds responsible. High standards, excellence, attention to detail, and those things can be wonderful. But sometimes perfectionism is simply fear dressed for. professionally. I can't launch yet, it's not ready. I need another certification. I need another website. I need to research more. I need the perfect logo. I need the perfect business plan. I need to know exactly how this will work. I need everybody and anybody to approve. I need to be completely prepared. And at some point preparation becomes hiding. And I know that one. Because when you're building something new, there's always one more thing you could do before beginning. But eventually, the only information you need is information you cannot get until you start. That's important. Some answers only exist on the other side of action. You cannot research your way into all of them. You have to put something into the world, and then the world responds. Maybe it's a yes, maybe it's a no. Maybe it says interesting, but not like that. And that's data. So ask yourself right now, what am I calling preparation that might actually be here? Like seriously, what have you been getting ready to do for six months? A year? Five years? What's the smallest version you could try? Not the perfect version, the experiment. And that's possibility thinking. This is where our previous episode connects directly to today. Where are you most willing to fail? Usually somewhere you feel safe. Think about the people you trust the most. You can say, I don't know. I screwed that up. That was a terrible idea. I need help. You can laugh at yourself. Why? Because you don't believe the mistake is going to cost you the relationship. You still belong. And that's why belonging matters so deeply to innovation. Belonging creates safety. Safety creates reasonable risk taking. Risk taking creates experimentation. Experimentation creates learning. Learning creates innovation. Think about the opposite of this. If failure leads to humiliation, people hide mistakes. If disagreement gets punished, people stop challenging bad ideas. If admitting uncertainty makes leaders appear weak, leaders pretend to know. If teachers are punished every time an experiment doesn't immediately produce results, teachers stop experimenting. If students are embarrassed for getting things wrong, Students stop raising their hands, and this is enormous. Because people sometimes think high accountability cultures require fear. But fear can actually make systems less accountable. Why? Because people hide things. If I know admitting a mistake will destroy me, I have an incentive to conceal it. If I know I can acknowledge it, examine it, repair it, and learn, I have an incentive to tell the truth. And you cannot improve what people are afraid to tell you. Now here's the nuance. I don't want failure forward turned into failure is amazing, though I've been doing it. No, failure can hurt, failure costs money, failure damages trust. Some mistakes have serious consequences, and some mistakes involve harm that needs repair. Some risks should not be taken casually. And some failure wasn't noble experimentation. Sometimes we didn't prepare. We ignored advice. Sometimes our egos got involved. Sometimes we acted recklessly. And sometimes we knew better. So fail forward doesn't eliminate accountability. It actually requires it. Because you cannot learn from something you're unwilling to own. Fail forward means don't waste the failure. If something went wrong, there is information there. Get it. What did this reveal? What assumption was incorrect? What did I underestimate? What did I overestimate? What did I ignore? What worked even though the overall attempt failed? What do I do now? And then what am I going to do with that information? Because failure alone does not create growth. People can make the same mistake for twenty years. Experience isn't automatically wisdom. Reflected upon experience can become wisdom. So let's make this practical. This is a framework I want you to remember. F-A-I-L F. Face what happened. Tell the truth. No spin, no shame, no immediate blame. Just what happened. Imagine a school launches a new attendance intervention. Six months later, attendance hasn't improved. Facing. The data doesn't show the result we wanted. That isn't an attack. That's reality. Or personally, I launched something. Nobody bought it. Facing. Don't immediately say people just don't understand. Maybe. But first, nobody bought it. That's information. A. Analyze without blame. Now investigate. This is where curiosity replaces shame. Why might this have happened? What factors contributed? What was within our control? What wasn't? What assumptions did we make? What information did we have? What information were we missing? What did people tell us that we ignored? What did we do well? Where did execution break down? This is not who can I blame? It's what can I understand? And if I contributed to the failure, accountability means I name it without turning I made a mistake into I am terrible. Those are not the same thing. I identify the learning. Now finish this sentence. Because this happened, I now know blank. Again, because this happened, I now know blank. Answer this question three times. Because this happened, I now know blank. Maybe it's I now know my audience needs something different. I now know students weren't involved in designing the solution. I now know I need more support. I now know this timeline was unrealistic. I now know the idea wasn't the problem, the implementation was. I now know I was solving the wrong problem. All of that is an example of learning. And L, launch the next attempt. This is where fail becomes forward. What's next? Not eventually. What is the next experiment? Version two. Different audience, different strategy, different conversation. Ask for help. Get more data. Repair the relationship. Try again. Or, and this matters. Stop. Sometimes fail forward means discovering this is not the right path. Quitting something intelligently isn't necessarily failure. Sometimes persistence becomes stubbornness, and the goal isn't to keep doing the same thing forever. The goal is to keep moving towards what matters. So face it, analyze it, identify it, and launch it. Fail forward. And here's something I want to build into this show. I want a library of real fail forward stories, not just celebrity stories. Not Oprah was fired once and look at her now. I want your story. Your story deserves to be heard. Teachers, parents, entrepreneurs, leaders, students, creators, people figuring life out. Tell me, what failed? What did it teach you? What did you do next? Message me @msjenniferawesome and start the method and start the message with fail forward. Some of these stories could become future conversations and episodes because somebody needs to hear the story you're embarrassed to tell. And if you want to be a part of what we're building beyond social media, contact me at awesomeconsulting.org/subscribe. All right, let's talk about leaders. There's a strange expectation that leaders should always know. Principals should always know. CEOs should always know. Parents should know. Political leaders should know. Experts should know. But leadership frequently involves making decisions with incomplete information. So what happens when the decision doesn't work? Bad leadership can look like, well, I'm going to defend it. Hide the evidence. Blame somebody else. Double down. Change the definition of success. And let's face it, we've all seen some version of that. But imagine a leader saying, here's what we were trying to accomplish. Here's what we tried. Here's what happened. Here's what the evidence tells us. Here's what we learned. And here's what we're changing. And that is powerful. Not because every failure is excusable, it isn't. But because responsible leadership requires the ability to distinguish between defending yourself and solving the problem? And here's a question every leader should ask. Can the people around me tell me that I am wrong? Not theoretically. Actually. Can somebody walk into my office and say, Jenni, this isn't working? Can your staff challenge your idea? Can your kids? Can your spouse? Can somebody disagree with you without paying a relationship tax? Because if everybody around you always agrees, you may not have built consensus, you may have built silence. So what's really hitting for me with that idea of who can come and tell me that this isn't working? I can already hear my husband saying that, well, I don't listen to him. That that he cannot tell me that things are wrong, that I will walk out of the room, that I will not be a participant in that conversation. So I'm already seeing some areas that I get to improve where I have failed. And so you know, this this is why fail forward isn't just a student mindset. It's a leadership discipline. It shows up in all aspects of our lives. Now let's bring this directly into schools. We're constantly telling kids have a growth mindset. What happens when they actually fail? That's the real curriculum. Do they get another attempt? Do they get meaningful feedback? Do they learn what went wrong? Can they revise? Can they repair? Or does the simp or does the system simply record the failure and move on? Think about grading. If the purpose of school is learning, then we have to at least ask, what should happen after a student demonstrates they haven't learned something yet? That's an important educational question. Think about behavior. Student makes a mistake, what happens? Punishment, repair, skill building, re-entry. Think about teachers. Teacher tries a new instructional strategy, it flops. Does a teacher think never doing that again? Or okay, why didn't that work? Imagine schools functioning as learning organizations, not organizations pretending to have everything figured out. Schools saying, we're testing this. Here's what we're measuring. Here's what students are telling us. Here's what teachers are telling us. Here's what we're changing. That's innovation. And here's the part that excites me. What if students learn to do this themselves, not just with academics, but with life? Friendship conflicts, failed projects, didn't make the team, didn't get accepted, made a terrible decision. Okay, face it, analyze it, identify the learning, launch the next attempt. Imagine graduating with that skill. Now I want to talk about the personal side. Because I think some of us know exactly what we're supposed to try. We're just terrified of what happens when it doesn't work. And I've been wrestling with this myself. There comes a point where waiting stops being preparation. Sometimes waiting becomes hiding. Waiting until somebody tells you you're ready, you're qualified, you're allowed. You're legitimate, you're an expert, you are important enough. You're good enough. And I think there are moments when purpose requires action before certainty. Not reckless action. Not I thought I had a thought, therefore I must be destiny. Discernment matters. Evidence matters. Wisdom matters. But eventually you have to move. And that's where fail forward becomes deeply connected to possibility. Because if I'm willing to learn, I don't need the perfect blueprints. I just need the next reasonable step. And that is such a freeing idea. I don't have to know how the entire thing unfolds. I need to know what's mine to do next. Then do it. See what happens. Learn. Move again. Here's something we don't talk enough about. Failure has a cost, but so does avoiding failure. What's the cost of never trying? We rarely calculate that. The book you never wrote, the program you never started, the school model nobody experimented with, the conversation you never had, the person you never approached, the business you never created, the art you never made, the ideas you never shared, the apology you never offered. question you never asked, the life you never tried. Those have cost too. And maybe sometimes the biggest failure isn't I tried and it didn't work. It may be the fear of success. That's worth sitting with. So let's actually do this together. Think of something that failed. Please, not your deepest trauma. Choose something you can examine productively. Alright, got it? Okay. Face it. What happened? No adjectives. Just facts. Analyze it. What contributed? What was yours? What wasn't? What assumptions did you make? Identify. Finish. Because this happened. I now know. Finish that three times. And launch. What happens next? One action. Not someday. What is one thing you can do in the next seven days? When you have the chance, write it down. That's fail forward. And here's my invitation this week. Send this episode to one person you trust. Not just, hey, listen to this. I want to do the fail forward exercise with you. Sit down. Coffee, Zoom, walking, whatever. Each of you bring one failure. Facing, analyzing, identify what it taught you, decide what you're launching next, and then hold each other to it. Then come tell me what happened. You can find me @msjenniferawesome. And if you want to go deeper with these conversations, resources, new episodes, and opportunities to participate in the work of Awesome Consulting and Educational Services. Contact me at awesomeconsulting.org/subscribe. All right, let's go back to the beginning. I know this was a longer episode. Not what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail, because that's not real. Instead, what would you attempt if you knew failure couldn't define you? And that's different. You might fail, you might get rejected, you might change your mind. You might build version one and realize it's terrible. You might discover you are solving the wrong problem. You might have to apologize. You might have to start over. You might discover the dream isn't actually the dream anymore. And you know what? You will have information you didn't have before. And then you get a choice. Shame, hide, blame, quit because a failure proves something about you, or Face, analyze, identify, launch, fail forward. Because if we're gonna build a better tomorrow, we're going to need people willing to experiment. We're going to need teachers willing to try something different, leaders willing to admit when something isn't working. Parents willing to change approaches. Organizations willing to question assumptions. Communities willing to test new ideas, and human beings willing to say. I got that wrong without adding, therefore I am wrong. Those are different. Failure is an event, learning is a choice. Forward is a direction. And maybe courage isn't knowing you'll succeed. Maybe courage is knowing whatever happens, I'm willing to learn. So this week, try something. Make the call. Submit the application. Have the conversation. Make version one. Ask the question. Take the next responsible step. And if it doesn't work, good. Now we have information. Use it. Fail forward. Next episode, we're going into another idea that sits right underneath possibility. Who told you that's the way it has to be? We're gonna talk about assumptions, limiting beliefs, tradition, systems. Rules nobody remembers creating. And for words that have killed more possibilities than I can count. We've always done it this way. I'm Jenni Awesome. This is a Better Tomorrow is possible, part of Awesome Consulting and Educational Services. People, possibility, progress. A better tomorrow isn't built by people who never fail. It's built by people who are willing to learn, adjust, and keep building. Fail forward, and let's build it together.