Why founders should expect and embrace failure

Are you prepared to fail? 

I mentor over 60 women founders and they all tell me this is a question they often get asked. 

I think it’s the wrong question to be asking. 

I believe we shouldn’t be avoiding failure. Because any business that survives, even if its form is completely unrecognisable from how it started, is never a failure. There might be tough times, expensive mistakes, and steep learning curves, but each of these startup battle scars was needed to create the version of success standing bravely before you today. 

For women founders in particular, failure can feel like something we need to avoid at all costs.

A recent report into the Untapped Potential of Entrepreneurial Women found that while 63% of women aged 40-59 find the idea of running their own business appealing, and 64% of these women have an idea ready to go, 81% said fear of failure is holding them back from taking action. 

And it’s not surprising when you consider female founders are still in the minority, and women in leadership are judged more harshly for their failures than men. 

But I believe failure is something we should embrace and expect, rather than something we should fear. 

Understanding failure

Not all failure is ‘bad’, just like not all success is ‘good’. Sometimes it’s accidental, sometimes it’s intentional, and sometimes it’s unavoidable. Your failures will litter the path to you finding success and solutions, and without failures, many lightbulb moments would never have happened. 

Failure is not a destination, it’s a process. And most work worth doing comes with inherent risks and uncertainty. Failures at the frontier of founding a startup are often the key to success and survival. They are a natural part of experimenting and pressure-testing ideas. 

While a traditional business might have proven processes and systems in place to protect against unnecessary failures or mistakes, a startup is by its very nature in a state of flux. The questions being answered are evolving, and the problems being faced don’t have clear solutions.  

The messy middle is often hard, but it’s also where inspiration strikes. 

Embracing failure

While we often hear that failure is the precursor to success and that failing fast is the secret to founders who do well, the truth is most of us are still afraid of failure. We’ve been taught from a young age that failure is bad and that we’re probably at fault. 

Embracing failure is a cultural shift for organisations, as it means encouraging your people to embrace risk-taking and be truly reflective of their failures. Rather than rushing to explain and excuse them, we should be taking these failures as opportunities to pause, reflect and learn. 

Examining failure can be confronting.

It means being honest with yourself about poor choices or incorrect predictions which can be detrimental to your self-esteem. For this reason, reflecting on failure is something we often rush through. We’re keen to move on to the next opportunity, rather than dwell on our shortcomings. 

Having the patience and self-awareness to examine a failure with an open mind, is the key to using that failure to inform your next move, 

Expecting failure

Rather than asking: “how can we avoid failure”, you should be asking: “how can we make the most of failure?”.

Startups can minimise the fallout from failure by creating conditions where failure is anticipated, but the consequences aren’t catastrophic.

For example, by setting up working groups or mini projects where people are empowered with the freedom to experiment with solutions, make mistakes, and come up with ideas, free from the pressure of feeling like their mistake could have devastating consequences.

Success vs failure

Our society’s obsession with success and winning means from a young age, we’re conditioned to strive for the accolades of high performance, especially if we want to stand out from the crowd. The same lessons permeate our understanding of entrepreneurial success. 

We see so many stories celebrating the founders who’ve achieved global success, but we forget to examine the many failed attempts that paved their road to glory. 

Rather than seeing our options as success or failure, we need to start considering failure as part of the natural process of finding success. 

When faced with an inevitable business challenge founders should ask. Do I need to pivot, persevere, or abandon?

1. Pivot: If something’s not working, could you change direction and pivot to a new opportunity or idea that might have better outcomes? 
2. Persevere: If you’re confident that the idea is good, even if something has failed, then reflect on what went wrong so that you can persevere using those lessons to inform better decisions. 
3. Abandon: Sometimes we need to let go of something that’s failing, even if it’s something we believed in. This is where failing fast and frequently can free you up for new opportunities. 

Success is not the absence of failure. 

This is why in the context of funding, failure isn’t a dirty word. As investors, we actively seek to fund founders who can boldly own their failures, and evidence that they’ve used those failures as key lessons along the way. 

So prepare to fail, it doesn’t mean you’ll fail to succeed. 

Tracey Warren is the CEO of F5 Collective.