Imagine making your biggest public presentation to date at the Eurobest festival in Antwerp. Your peers and heroes are in attendance. The venue is full of brilliant young creative talent. You’re prepared (more than you’ve ever been). You did the tech rehearsal, been on the stage, agreed lighting, props and how and where you’ll sit. You’re ready. Scared, but ready.
Backstage – waiting to be introduced – you laugh with the technician: “What’s the worst that could happen?” It’s particularly funny because your talk is all about failing: the fails that have made and shaped you; the fails from which you’ve learned; and your thoughts about how we can fail, and should find ways to fail, with less risk of fallout, trauma and personal injury. You both joke about setting up a tech fail, to make the failing point. “Ha ha!”
You’re invited on stage. You walk on to the fabulous Vinyl Villains track and open with a short clip of your daughter, giving the audience a warning that the talk contains some moments of mild discomfort and anxiety – which is okay, you say, as her mum is comfortable with feeling uncomfortable.
And I’m off (this story is, of course, about me). I begin to describe Livity, the agency for which I am co-founder and chief exec. I click to show the short “Day in the Life of Livity” video that we recently created and … nothing. I click again. I blink. I take a deep breath and look stage left to the technician: “Er, guys, the film’s not working.”
What followed next was a surreal five minutes or so (it felt like five hours) while we tried to reboot the entire system. My presentation, which had been checked and checked again, had corrupted. You couldn’t make it up. In fact, lots of members of the audience thought I was indeed making it up. A made-up “fail” to try to illustrate my failing talk.
Eventually we rebooted and I continued. The theatre remained full and I received a very warm round of applause and incredible feedback afterwards.
I think that my Eurobest presentation was meant to fail. It was meant to help illustrate the points I wanted to make. The fail narrative has grown significantly over the past few years. We all know that we should celebrate failing – that we’ll evolve and find new, better ways and paths more quickly; that we grow, stretch and improve our creativity and innovation if we’re brave enough to fail.
I agree with all of that, but I have a growing concern that we are not balancing the narrative with the message, “how to fail without breaking others and yourself”. Failing is great, but it can’t just be me who thinks that failing – fail after fail – is not emotionally sustainable if we’ve not created the right conditions for it.
What are those conditions? At Livity, I often talk about how we are a business built on fun, faith and friendship – and these have been, in part, the conditions for creating good failure. Fun and a sense of humour can soften the blow of the fail and laughter does good things to our brains, opening up different thinking and making us braver. Faith or belief in what you are doing and in one another is crucial to creating the right mindset for good failing. An environment that feels friendly or full of friendship is invaluable for creating a trusted space in which to fail.
I also shared at the event two other Fs that I believe are crucial to creating the conditions for great failure. We need to encourage ourselves and our teams to be fearless, give it a go and try it – and to be fearless we must rid ourselves of “imposter syndrome” (where we don’t quite believe our own success; where we think we’re blagging it or going to get found out). Imposter syndrome is terribly unhelpful to good failing.
Finally, we must attach forgiveness to the failing rally cry. In order to both protect and build resilience, we need to encourage a culture of forgiveness.
Even more important than forgiving others is forgiving yourself, which is impossible for many of us, but essential if we are to reap the benefits of failing and keep our resilience and energy topped up and ready for the next phase … and inevitable fail.
In fact, close your eyes, just for a moment. Think about something you got wrong, mucked up – that big fail that lingers in your memory; the one that makes your heart beat a bit faster and louder. The one that makes your cheeks burn.
… forgive yourself.
What have I learned about failing? That it’s not the end of the world. That you learn, evolve and that you truly will be better for it all. You might need to be patient, but you will recover.
Michelle Morgan is the co-founder and chief executive of Livity and chair of youth and diversity for the Marketing Agencies Association
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