Coding, Managing and Christianity

Failure

I recently read the book “The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth” from John C. Maxwell. It is a great book with many valuable thoughts about growth and personal development. Among other things, he writes that failure doesn’t define one, which made me think of how I respond when I do something wrong.

In my previous job I tried to rewrite a product and the project failed (I have a draft article that I will also post some day). On occasion it still occupies my thoughts. In retrospect I made some crucial mistakes:

• I didn’t work closely with the main stake holders to secure their support, especially since the product would have reduced the importance of their role in the company.
• I attempted to replace an existing system as a whole instead of replacing pieces of it incrementally
• I wasted my time building infrastructure that I could have “bought” (you also pay a price for open source) instead of building what is unique to the domain, like logging or user authentication.
• No matter how well engineered or brilliant something is, it will only succeed when you do the business and people-relationship tasks well also.

It is a shame that the project didn’t succeed, because we did a lot of things well. Anyways, thinking back about when something didn’t go well, I can see the following responses:

• I get angry - this affected mainly my peers in the Engineering management team, especially when they disagreed with me about something. I didn’t spend much time listening and understanding, but instead was quick to silence them with harsh words.
• I blame others - when there was opposition I blamed others and claimed they were intentionally undermining the project
• I wallowed in shelf pity - why is everyone so mean and working against me?

On other occasions I don’t respond in such ways. I accept the mistake, make a mental note and move on. So what is the difference?

One difference is that I anticipate failure. I know things are unlikely to go right at the first try and I have to learn. So a mistake is just that a mistake, or learning about one way that doesn’t work. It reminds me of Thomas Edison who tried numerous filaments for his light bulb just to see them burn out. He didn’t give up after the first one, the 10th, or 100th try, but rather noted them as another one that doesn’t work and doesn’t needed to be tried again.

The author Eric Ries of “The Lean Startup” talks about the same idea, when he recommends that a start-up should run many small experiments. Each experiment has to be designed to test a hypothesis and the result being measurable so the business can learn something. This is notability different from the approach “let’s try something and see how it goes” - without a plan or direction, one will arrive somewhere, it just might not be a good place.

Maxwell defined Fail as the acronym “First Attempt In Learning” - This is what a mistake or a failure should be, a lesson in life to learn something valuable going forward.

I hope I learned a few things from my previous job. Developing a product replacement incrementally is the easy part. It may have technical challenges, but it is actionable. The other lessons are harder, because they are about character and personality. As Norman Schwarzkopf said: “Ninety-nine percent of leadership failures are failures of character”.

In Genesis 19 the story of Sodom, Gomorrah and Lot is told. God is about to wipe the two cities from the face of the earth and Lot is told to leave with his family, because he was righteous. He is also told not to look back. He does not look back, but on the way out his wife does and freezes into a pillar of salt. The same applies to us and our failures. We should remember them and more importantly what we learned, but not look back in way that we freeze in place and stop growing. We will always make mistakes, but hopefully different ones and grow through them over time.