Not An Option

A big oops happened this weekend, and it has me thinking about failure. It’s a topic I’ve talked about before, but there’s plenty more that can be said.

Common leadership advice is to avoid making failure out to be a bad thing. “Failure is good,” well meaning folks will say. They’re not completely wrong, but they’re not absolutely right either.

Failure can only be good in moderation. Of course repeated failure of the same kind is bad. Absolutely learn from mistakes so they’re not repeated. But continually making new kinds of failure isn’t great either. No endeavor, professional or personal, can sustain that.

Eventually there need to be successes to offset the setbacks. So I’m not keen on over-celebrating failures, or treating failure as something that ought not have consequences. Maybe in the case of this CrowdStrike fiasco no one deserves to take the blame? But I doubt it.