Five years ago I stood in front of an audience of parents and told them that I wanted their sons and daughters to fail.
It was a deliberately provocative statement and, as I had hoped, the statement got their attention, for most of them were very keen that their children did the very opposite and were actively encouraged and enabled to succeed not fail.
That talk was part of the launch for a whole school ‘Failure Week’ in which we sought to reframe the narrative around the concept of failure- so often seen as terminal or catastrophic – to advocate its positive benefits as an important step on the road to success.
Staff and pupils took part in a variety of Failure Challenges from learning an instrument to performing standup comedy, participating in a ‘Failure Choir’, getting in a rowing boat for the first time, and countless other activities. For my own part, I’ll never forget the trepidation as I stepped on to a Penny Farthing and attempted to cycle down the tree-lined avenue of the main school entrance, nor indeed the somewhat terrifying experience of having to perform ‘Camptown Races’ on the trombone to a packed theatre of pupils and staff having only picked up the instrument four weeks before.
As Matthew Syed argues in his book Black Box Thinking, “only by redefining failure will we unleash progress, creativity, and resilience.” That was very much the impetus behind Failure Week, and if it helped our pupils think differently about failure, then it was a success (though, if Failure Week was a success, does that mean it was in fact a failure?!).
The F Word
Failure is all too often seen as a dirty word.
To be seen to have failed is humiliating. Embarrassing. Nobody wants that label on them.
So much so that failure has become synonymous with another ‘F’ word: Fear. The prospect of Failure is so terrifying to us that we are crippled by a fearfulness that leads us to avoid the potential for any possibility of failure.
So why is it that we fear failure? I suspect that for most of us, a large part of our fear of failure is down to worrying about what other people think about us. We want to be accepted. We want to be seen to fit in. Failure, therefore, isn’t a hat we particularly want to wear.
It’s probably likewise got a lot to do with confidence. Success feels good. Failure doesn’t. We like to win; losing, not so much.
We don’t want to fail, so we try our level best to avoid it. Instead, we tend to reside in our Comfort Zones, spaces where we feel confident, comfortable, and safe. A zone where we know that, even if it’s not somewhere we will necessarily succeed, it is certainly somewhere that we can avoid failing.
Yet as anyone who has ever succeeded at the top level will tell you, to achieve success you are going to have to experience failure, and indeed embracing failure as not just an inevitability but a positive stepping stone towards helping you achieve the success that you strive for. From JK Rowling – who chose to speak on ‘The Fringe Benefits of Failure’ when she addressed graduates of Harvard University – to James Dyson, whose 5,126 prototypes eventually led to his final cyclone technology breakthrough, the list of successful authors, innovators and sporting stars who extol the benefits of failure is a lengthy one. Most famously, perhaps, one of the greatest – if not the greatest – basketball players of all time, Michael Jordan, put it like this:
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Failing Forward
For the past month and a half, I’ve been very much out of my comfort zone doing something that I find very difficult and have no prior experience in: dancing. Convinced to take part as a contestant in the charity event Strictly Shropshire raising funds for Hope House & Ty Gobaith children’s hospices, along with the other 11 contestants, I’ve been tasked with learning to dance, performing a routine- in my case a salsa number – to a packed audience of over 400 people on the evening of Friday 25th November. The very thought of it is utterly terrifying, but as a process, I have greatly enjoyed the experience of being a learner once again, with all the frustrations, failing and falling that comes with it, but likewise the satisfaction, confidence and joy that comes- as CS Lewis put it – from failing forward towards success.
With each lesson I’ve had (and with all the secret practising I’ve been doing at home whilst nobody was watching!) the things that initially seemed impossible are now coming more easily, and with each step I’m taking- even the wrong ones – I know that I’m taking steps forward.
Facing Failure Fearlessly
Strange though it may sound, my greatest ambition for the school in which I am Headmaster is that it is known to be a failing school. If Oswestry School is known as a failing school, that should tell you that we are comfortable with the concept of failure, understand its role as a stepping stone on the journey to success, and we don’t fear failure. I want us to be courageous in our approach to failure, determined to step out of our comfort zones, doing things that are difficult, challenging, perhaps even a little scary. For it is in that space that each of us learns most: the Discomfort Zone.
As we resumed the second half of term at Oswestry School, I urged my pupils – and indeed staff- to approach failure fearlessly, stepping out of their comfort zone and into the infinitely rewarding space of the discomfort zone. When we challenge ourselves to learn new skills and push ourselves harder, we might risk the possibility of failure, but, to repeat CS Lewis’s lines once again, “Failures are the fingerposts on the road to achievement. One fails forward towards success.”
Face failure fearlessly. Fail forward towards success.
Peter Middleton 