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Failing Foward

Do you have a culture where people are allowed and even encouraged to fail without repercussions? I met with Adel Chaveleh as part of our video series to discuss the power of learning from failure and how to succeed. It’s no secret that learning often takes risks and failure so that one can learn. Think about football players with the ball.  They “fail forward”--meaning they may stumble or trip, but they keep their legs churning and fall the right way, which is the difference between making the goal or missing it. It’s easy to say we encourage learning from failures but what are our reactions when someone does fail?  Do we embrace learning and use it to solve future problems or pivot?  The challenge is that disastrous failures can be catastrophic for a business. Thus, failure must be controlled in a small-stakes environment that accelerates learning.

Embrace a Fail-Safe Culture

To set the right culture as a leader that embraces learning through failure you must practice being humble. Team members who are afraid of showing their struggles because of potentially being fired will never have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Instead, it is vital to create a culture where you allow team members to seek help from both teams and professional business coaches. Adel emphasized in our interview that he wants his team to fail and trusts them to fail in non-catastrophic ways. One way he does so is by giving points to team members who make small failures to accelerate their learning. He believes that building the right culture to embrace failure is difficult and often requires the development of leadership soft skills. To truly embrace failure, you must create an environment where it is safe to fail and embrace a culture of continuous learning. While embracing failure, it is pivotal that team members learn from their experiences. 

AI Risk-Taking

Later in our interview Adel Chaveleh shared with us the common mistakes companies make when trying to implement risk and learning. According to Adel, a recent pitfall of many companies is trying to keep up with competitors by implementing AI. While they may fail fast, they are not learning or using it effectively. Therefore, to learn from AI, you must find practical applications for it when you see fit by analyzing the problems of your business. Adel recommends using AI as a solution to your problems and finding ways to integrate it rather than trying to create specific use scenarios for it.  In other words–don’t build a problem for AI, instead use AI to find more efficient and competitive ways to solve problems now or in the future.

Practice Having an Even Disposition

When embracing a culture of failure, it can be difficult not to overreact to the circumstances whether it be rapid successes or failures. In our interview, Adel mentioned that he values an even disposition, taking wins and losses as they come and go and learning from the results. People tend to overestimate their impact when things are successful but underestimate their impact when things are not. To keep an even disposition, you have to stay humble, yet confident and always try to learn. Continuing along our sports analogy, a shocking stat is that Michael Jordan has the record for most missed game-winning shot opportunities. Does anyone seriously think Michael Jordan is bad or that these individual failures affected his mentality? By not letting individual failures get to his head Jordan has cemented his career as one the best individual basketball players of all time. The key to instilling an even disposition is to think about the big picture for your business. Small setbacks today will mean nothing in the grand scheme of things as long as you are moving forward. 

The Pivotal Role in Planning and Leveraging Risk.

While failure is a great way to learn, it’s very difficult to convince others and even yourself how to embrace the mindset and prevent catastrophic risk. Oftentimes companies want risk-takers but punish people who fail. Deshorn King at LogisX focuses on applauding risk-takers by focusing on their intent, not always their results. As a risk-taker himself, he talked to us about entering the trucking industry and how risk-taking helped set him up for success today.

Deshorn King gave insight into how he built his career and started his company LogisX through risk. While critics may call Deshorn a risk taker, he says he embraces learning from experience, good or bad. When entering the trucking industry, Deshorn did not initially know how operations worked and relied on freight brokers to help him find haul jobs. Small businesses and individual truck drivers often face hard times finding work. This is because the large trucking industry sees them as high-risk. Starting LogisX, Deshorn wanted to focus on handling the logistical services for the little guys' contracts and embracing their risk. When facing steep competition in the trucking industry, Deshorn leveraged the risk of fighting for the small guy to create a successful logistical company. He mitigates his risk by planning for contingency and finding a way to plan for both success and failure. According to King, the best way to learn is to prepare for any situation and study the results. 

Summary

While Deshorn’s advice and strategy differ from Adel’s, both deeply understand the value of learning from failure and implementing a strategy. Both prepare their team members with a consistent strategy and set of rules to abide by to give their team the confidence to take risks. Adel even implements a company scoreboard to know how his team is doing and understand what he and his business need to work on going forward. Now more than ever to stay competitive, businesses need to embrace a culture of risk-taking without punishing risk-takers. To do so they must mitigate the risk by reducing the stakes and planning for all outcomes. Every great business success story starts with risk. While you may not see large businesses take huge risks in the current age, they all had to take massive risks to get to where they are today. 

A special thank you to Deshorn King at LogisX and Adel Chaveleh at Core Loop for sharing their valuable insights on risk-taking and learning in our interview series and inspiring this blog.