This is BS: The Criminalization of Failure

Imagine a world in which learning were criminalized.

Where zero-tolerance policies were used to punish students for honest mistakes.
Where doing your best with the information you have and the latest in modern technology were not enough to protect you from liability.
Where simply anticipating the impact of macro-economic shifts on your company could result in a groundswell of distrust and populist angst, while not anticipating them could get you subpoenaed to testify before Congress.
Where doing something right but unpopular—ie, trusting others to see beyond the tips of their noses—can get you maligned and cost you your job. (I be the author of that first article there would love to take it back, huh?)

Can you picture that?

Scary place, isn’t it?

Right. Welcome to the United States of You’re Not Allowed to Fail, Not Allowed to Take Risks, and Not Allowed to Learn.

Our society has grown increasingly intolerant of mistakes. Minor mistakes are now often fatal, stifling research, squashing productive debate, and killing progress. And while you may learn more from your successes than your failures, you can’t succeed until you feel safe, and that means being able to risk failure.

Exacerbating this problem is the fact that mistakes are inevitable—we’re still human! Which creates a conundrum: we can’t help erring, but to err is to commit career suicide. So what happens instead? We must now expend energy lying to ourselves about the definition of failure, covering our own asses in front of others, and tearing down opponents before they have a chance to tear us down.

The upshot of these behaviors is that people who tell the truth about what it takes to great get laughed out of town, while our world starts filling up with crooks, bums, “pathetic” blowhards, liars, and mudslingers who play to the illusion.

Because when everyone’s focused on how to spin the fail, the ones who rise to the “top” are the ones who spin it best.

Not good.

As Mary Jo and Julie noted on my blog yesterday, failure is an integral part of the learning process. Take it away, and you rob people of that dear teacher, experience.

Now here are four simple ideas for getting back to goodness:

First, and most importantly, when failure happens to you, get back up and keep going. Incompetence is a phase. Push through.

Second, practice patience. Spend more time supporting others than poking fun at them or bemoaning how you’re surrounded by idiots. You’re not. You’re surrounded by people just like you. If you find yourself judging others for stupid reasons or turning your world into something reminiscent of junior high, stop. Then send an email to a friend and ask him/her what kind of help s/he needs.

Finally, when someone else’s failure impacts you, make like Chris Rock and “Let it slide.” (Link NSFW)

Prepare to let a lot of things slide; we’ve got some ways to go before our afraid-to-fail culture rights itself.