Day 25: Failure Feedback Loop

Today you will learn what the failure feedback loop is, why failure is the most information rich data stream there is, and how to use failure to your advantage in reaching your purpose.

Summary

What is Failure?

Failure is an information rich data stream that alerts you that you have chosen the wrong strategy for solving your problem and pursuing your purpose.

• Failing does not mean we are on the wrong path, that we will never accomplish our purpose, or that we are fundamentally bad people.
• All of our progress as human beings, in science, in business, in human thought, has been predicated on people coming up with an idea, testing it out, getting objective feedback, and coming up with a new idea when the first one does not work out.

Why is Failure important for reaching your purpose?

In pursuit of your purpose you're never going to have full certainty of any plan. So you can't avoid failure.

• Risk is inevitable and no amount of preparation can completely protect you. You'll develop the capacity to make small decisions along the way only in the practice of making those decisions constantly.
• When you're doing the planning phase, do enough research, ask enough questions, but remember that action and taking a risk is going to be the beating heart of your daily practice.
• Regardless of the outcome of any action, you're going to have to step into the unknown and learn to pivot along the way.

Recall that we choose strategies to reach our goals, but they're interchangeable and oftentimes you need to learn different skills in order to fulfill those strategies.

• As you start implementing those strategies, you're going to come across failures which will be signs that maybe you've chosen the wrong strategy, and you need to choose something else in order to continue progress towards your goals.
• These failures point you to where you can improve your weaknesses, where you need to go learn new skills in order to fully implement a strategy.
• So as you decide between different strategies, plan for success, but learn from your failures.

How to Failure to your advantage

Step One: Create a Hypothesis

• Outline your purpose, your goals, and the strategies you believe will help you to achieve those goals and to solve the problems that you are addressing.

Step Two: Create an Experiment for Implementation

• Return lessons 17 & 18 where outlined the specific details of your strategy.
• Make sure you have measurable objectives and a baseline status that would serve as evidence for your failure or success.

Step Three: Run the Experiment

• Do the work necessary to implement your strategy, run your experiment and try your solution.
• The feasibility of trying any strategy depends on many factors including: the kinds of solutions, whether you are implementing them collaborative with others or individually, and then the type of time and resources it's going to take to run that strategy.

Step Four: Collect Feedback and Assess Your Experiment

• As you begin implementing your solution, watch those key indicators to see if you're having success or not.
• It's important to collect data and to analyze and assess the effectiveness of your efforts on the problem you're addressing.
• Look for areas where you can improve the strategy for implementing your solution.

Step Five: Create a New Strategy

• Develop a new strategy that incorporates what you've learned from your experiment, adjust accordingly, and then do the entire process again, applying new ideas to the next iteration of the solution.

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Activity

Practice assessing a failure. Go through the process of looking at your hypothesis, implementing an actionable part of your solution and begin collecting that feedback and assessing your solution.

• In what ways has this solution worked?
• In what ways has it not worked?
• What have you learned from implementing this part of your solution?

Take those learnings and develop a new strategy, adjust accordingly and keep doing the process.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.