When was the last time you really learned from failure?

Everyone loves success stories, but look around you: failure is everywhere. Projects fail to deliver, collaborations collapse, systems fail to improve, organisations screw up, people blunder, policies fall short, and then what? We acknowledge it, we talk about it, then we learn from it and we implement what we have learned. We get better or get different….Or so we should.  But what do we actually do when we realise we’re sailing the Titanic and flying the Hindenburg? Or like Yves, not flying a commercial airplane anymore….

Many years ago I went hitchhiking through France. A lone female, out in the middle of nowhere during one of the coldest nights in an unusually harsh winter. I had spent hours at a gas station waiting for a lift- there was hardly anyone around. At some point a man stopped to fill his tank and I walked up to him asking if he was heading in the right direction, and if he would be up for giving me a ride. He was very surprised to see me (“I haven’t seen anyone hitchhiking on this road since the 80s!”) and it was going to be a long boring drive so he agreed. For hours we chatted away. I was a lot younger than he was and listened wide-eyed while he told me about his experiences working first as a mechanic, then training as a fighter pilot and how he got fired from his last job as a commercial airline pilot. 

At some point I noticed something shiny in the back seat. It had a jet engine attached and did not look like anything else I’d seen. So I asked him what it was. His response: “I have built jet-powered wings so I can fly like a bird”. Today I was reminded of this special meeting when this video popped up in my feeds:

 What really stuck from our four hour long conversation that night is how this journey of his really started.

Although Yves had harboured a life-long dream to do this, he only decided to go all in after he was fired from his Swissair pilot gig. And only after an initial period of not feeling so great about losing his job (anyone who has ever been fired can tell you it can really mess with your self confidence and sense of self-worth).

This brings us back to failure. No matter how smart or knowledgeable you are, however well you plan, it’s impossible to go through life without things suddenly taking a turn for the worse at some point. Nassim Taleb wrote a marvelous book about Black Swan events, rare events of large magnitude and consequence that cannot be predicted. In it he makes a good point about the futility of trying to predict black swan events, suggesting that a better approach is to build robustness against negative ones that occur and be able to exploit positive ones. This means accepting and preparing for failure as a part of doing, well, anything.

Setting up a new project or business venture, getting a large insitution to take on a new approach towards policy-making, lobbying an institutional funder to rethink their strategy or getting a government to fix broken policies is setting yourself up to fail. Almost every day. Because the outcomes of our efforts are often unpredictable- especially if we are navigating complex adaptive systems (like the economy). If you are determined enough to keep at anything long enough, you will eventually have some successes. But how do you survive the failures on the path to getting there?

Whoever you are, I am proposing we explore this together.

Not only can it really help us to fix things while they are still salvagable. Possibly even limit the damage caused by consequences of failure.  It also makes you braver: there is something liberating about accepting the worst possible scenario as a possible outcome of any new endeavor...and then just going ahead and doing it anyway. Yves taught me this many years ago. It has helped me to weather many crises, and to support others in doing the same.

Why not co-create the ultimate guide for surviving failure in our professional lives?  

We will not be starting from scratch: Edgeryders has some experience in pioneering new ways of getting large number of individuals to do this collectively. Bootstrapping a company that lives in symbiosis with an unruly online community of almost 3000 individuals in over 40 countries is a great school. It’s often counterintuitive for people who grew up in more traditional organisations, but the results so far are promising. It seems our approach:

• generates new solutions for addressing entrenched problems
• is effective at building constituencies for change and buy-in for new approaches.
• works within conservative, notoriously risk averse organisations as well as in bleeding-edge startups.

We also have a context to do this: a conference format called Living On The Edge which is built as a knowledge engine using collective intelligence methodologies and tools (one of which was recently supported by the Rockefeller Foundation). We asked two participants in last year’s event what they had to say about it:

The fifth edition of Living on the Edge (#lote5) takes place in Brussels, 25-28 February 2016. Tickets to #LOTE5 are not free of charge, but they are not for sale either. The only way to get a ticket is to earn it by helping build the event in collaboration with others.

This is the invitation to the event: 

If you happen to be in Brussels, feel free to drop by our office on Rue Pierre Decoster 75 during office hours. It's within walking distance to Gare Du Midi -we love spontaneous visits from old friends and new :)