Fail more often at decision level

This is a copy of the mail I sent to all company members. Since I am not blogging enough and don’t have the time to draft better posts so here we go with a slightly modified version of the company group email. As a company and as a person this is a culture we/I want to develop and promote. Decision making/responsibilities should flow to the roots of a company. Enjoy the copy of the email.

Don’t get me wrong when I say “Lets fail more often” as this is a muddy and not so clear mixture of two phrases “attempt more for more success” and “99 attempts out of 100 will fail”. So “Lets fail more often”.

Here are few things that you can start with at decision level (And I SERIOUSLY want you to do that)

1. Take a decision and implement it if you feel confident about it. Once it is implemented or once you have taken the decision throw a mail to the concerned group. I really want the decision making to flow to the roots of the company.
2. Mistakes are often mistaken: Know what a real mistake is, it will give you more confidence in decision making.
3. Grow good in decision-making: I debate with myself more often that I can eliminate obvious errors with decision making (for cumulative respect point). So while making the decision do debate it with yourself and if you feel it as correct, GO AHEAD. Either the decision will be correct or the learning will help you grow OR BOTH :). We just need to attempt honestly.
4. Your decision has a cumulative respect: Don’t expect people to respect your first/second/….. decision, they will be more calculative but once you start making better decision more often your cumulative respect count will grow up. There will be a time when you will ask a person to jump out of window and they will do that before asking “WHY?” but it will take time :), so have patience.
5. Start with small decisions: Don’t jump into bigger decisions until and unless it is to be done urgently. Start with small decisions and grow. A person who is good at decision making at any level, be it home, group of friends, office parties, .. will be good at company level decision making as well. All you need is to start slow and start as smart as possible.
6. Multi-dimension knowledge: Years will only add up physical weakness but proper observation will help you gain experience. A 2 month old team member can sometimes do better decision making than a 2 year old based on a better observational power/attitude. Get multi
   dimension knowledge (Knowledge from all related field). A person who is able to think from various dimensions to the problem can do better at decision making, so get involved with different team works.
7. Ask for more opportunities: Your mouth is an open door to your thinking, talk wise. People give you more responsibilities based on your performance and talks reflects a lot of it. So talk wisely.
8. Make others comfortable: This will help others teach you. Learn from mistakes not necessarily only from yours, you can learn more from others mistakes as well. Keep your eyes wide open, dreams as high as possible and attitude down to earth for a better learning. Let others teach you more often.

4 Comments »

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1. Hi Aji,

   As per your suggestion people have already started failing but I don’t know what’s their intention. It should be like, try hard to reach success, and if fails at last, no problem. Failures are pillar of success. But 100% effort should be there to succeed.

   Thanks,
   Debashis

   
   
   Debashis on September 15, 2007 - 1:43 pm @ 1:43 pm

2. Thanks, thats a good point. As human (if sincere and passionate about the doing) we always try for success but failure comes in as unexpected add-on and often discourage us from next attempt. So when we start accepting the fact that we will certainly fail at many instances and ITS OK TO FAIL, we start attempting more. Once a person said, “I don’t know which attempt will make it successful but if I attempt 100 times i am sure to hit one big success”. Many company does this, they make small teams and allow them to attempt individually and the one showing good progress/user-acceptance is given a push and the one which fails is destroyed under constructive destruction but never discouraged. The employee with 10 failures + 0 success is counted no lesser than who had 10 success + 0 failures, attempts are highly encouraged as the one with 0 success might give you the biggest success … so keep trying, keep failing .. success can’t be too far off.

   
   
   AjiNIMC on September 16, 2007 - 5:38 pm @ 5:38 pm

3. How much failure is too much. You said Failures are stepping stones for success. But then too many failures become at times the bottleneck for next level of growth. So where according to you one should draw a line that this is it and call it a quit before failure becomes a habit.

   Cheers
   - Samir

   
   
   Samir Kumar Mishra on November 10, 2007 - 11:02 am @ 11:02 am

4. Thanks for the comment Samir, welcome to the blog.

   >> How much failure is too much
   It is your call and the limitations you have, in short its you who decides it. Such are major decisions of life and that can make all the difference in life. You’ll be surprised to know how far you can go from the point where you thought it was the end. Example is Abraham Lincoln.

   To come to reality, yes we are not often allowed to fail enough. I wrote a post for http://www.sramanamitra.com/ “Why Indians fear failure”. I am waiting for her to post it else I will post it here only. You have restrictions and limitations, you need to live within the system and thus will have to take the call sometimes.

   >> But then too many failures become at times the bottleneck for next level of growth.
   Never, it can never be a bottleneck for next level of growth. It will surely be the stepping stone for next success.

   >> So where according to you one should draw a line that this is it and call it a quit before failure becomes a habit.
   Failure will never become a habit, attempt will. Neither failure is in our hands nor success (.01% is success chances by the way), we go by cut feel that yes we are going to succeed this time. So attempt it. The person who is with a habit of attempt is highly valuable for any organization. I have great respect for them and try to give them helping direction.

   I think I should write another post, How to minimize the cost of failure? I practice this at work, I attempt but with max frugality.

   
   
   AjiNIMC on November 10, 2007 - 11:33 am @ 11:33 am

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