The Freedom To Make Mistakes

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.” This is a quote by Mahatma Gandhi, who also famously said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” We can take a lot from the wisdom of this great thinker. Gandhi described himself as a ‘pragmatic idealist.’

The wisdom of learning from failure is undeniable, and yet many in business who do it well are extremely rare. This is not due to a lack of commitment to learning. Business leaders genuinely want to help their businesses learn from failures to improve their future performance. 

In some examples, they and their teams spend many hours with post-event analysis and postmortems, but often these efforts lead to no real change. It’s likely those leaders are thinking about failure the wrong way.

Most bosses believe that failure is bad, naturally. They also believe that learning from it is easy. Ask people to look back on what they did wrong and urge them to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

It can be said that these views are mistaken. Failure is not always bad. In business life, it is sometimes bad, sometimes inevitable, and sometimes even good. 

Learning from failures is difficult. The necessary skills required to effectively detect and analyse failures are not common in many companies. Companies need new and better ways to go further than merely identifying superficial lessons. It’s important to ignore old cultural beliefs and orthodox perceptions of success and embrace the value that comes from failure’s experiences. Leaders can start by understanding how the blame game gets in the way.

Author J.K. Rowling said, "It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default." 

Richard Branson tells how he failed to convince a major publishing house to buy out his student magazine. While they wanted to focus on distribution methods and details, as he explained his vision for a whole host of new student enterprises, from magazines to travel companies to banks, they ran a mile. As far as we know, he is now one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world.

It is said that when Walt Disney first introduced Mickey Mouse, it was met with rejection after rejection. In fact, he said he was rejected 300 times before he finally got that life-changing ‘yes’ to finance his proposal.

Many businesses pay lip service to the idea of trial and error. Failure is often ridiculed by peers and colleagues and penalised by bosses. This stifles innovation and creativity and is a blocker to growth. 

People are often quick to blame themselves for failure. But not doing something because you’re afraid to get started isn’t going to help you, or the business you are in, grow.

Successful businesses of the future will be those that create environments that encourage risk-taking and experimentation. It is key for enterprises to advance innovation and deliver growth. By adopting a culture that values and supports these behaviours, organisations can empower their employees to think creatively, explore new ideas, and take calculated risks.

Inspire your workforce to take calculated risks by rewarding those who fail. The emphasis must be on the word “calculated risk,” and thereby hangs the challenge. Rewarding success is easy. Rewarding failure is more nuanced. Businesses don’t want to encourage recklessness but do not want to stifle risk-taking.

I leave the last word to Bill Gates