Successful Failure

Week of Monday, October 7, 2002

On a recent flight home from New York, for a change of pace I grabbed a few magazines that I normally do not read. I enjoyed Runner's World and Red Herring, but there was one article in particular that caught my eye from the Harvard Business Review (August 2002). The piece was called “The Failure-Tolerant Leader” by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes, based upon their book by that same title. The article begins with a quote from IBM's Thomas Watson, Sr., who once remarked that “the fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”

For most people in the competitive corporate world this must sound like naive advice. It is almost certain not to be their personal experience. But the authors make a number of interesting points. Failure is a necessary prerequisite of invention, which requires risk taking. Failure also provides insights that cannot normally be gained from successes. But what I found most interesting was their observation that it is one thing for corporate leaders to address failure at the abstract level of corporate policies, processes, practices and so forth. But it is another thing to address failure within corporate structures at the personal level. For most employees failure is an enormous personal threat that portends embarrassment, shame, loss of esteem, and even the loss of your job. Most paralyzing of all, they observed how the stigma of failure at the personal level breeds fear. When Robert Shapiro of Monsanto discovered how “terrified” his employees were of failure, he set out to change that mind set because he knew that, among other things, fear of failure stymies creativity.

Failure-tolerant leaders know how to move beyond simplistic definitions of success and failure, where the former is always positive and the latter is always construed as its polar opposite negative. Rather, they see success and failure as complements. They also try to gain a measure of perspective on matters. Don Shula, one of the winningest coaches in NFL history, remarked that he “didn't get consumed by losses and didn't get overwhelmed by successes.” Rather, he took both in stride. Failure-tolerant leaders also know how to empathize with employees by sharing their own failures and by offering unequivocal forgiveness for mistakes. Finally, they do their best to replace a corporate culture of fierce competition, where one's success often comes at the expense of a colleague's failure, with a culture of collaboration.

The article by Farson and Keyes reminded me of one of our family's favorite books, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. Lansing tells the story of the British explorer Ernest Shackleton and his failed attempt to cross the Antarctic by land in 1914 (he also failed in a similar attempt in 1908). He and his crew of 27 men never even made it far enough to make a beginning. The Endurance became trapped in ice and then was crushed to splinters. The men then negotiated 22-foot life boats 800 miles across open sea to South Georgia Island, where Shackleton left them, sailed back to civilization, then returned to rescue the waiting crew. He didn't lose a single life, a testament to incredible courage, leadership and tenacity. Thus the appropriate epithet that his voyage was the most “successful failure” ever.

What might a Christian on the journey with Jesus say about failure in the Christian life? As I thought about the HBR article and the Shackleton voyage, I began to think of two types of failure.

First, some of the most significant people in God's story of redemption experienced extraordinary failures, but somehow moved beyond them to be the people that God wanted them to be. They were “successful failures.” Moses was a murderer, Jacob and Esau were conniving, competitive rascals,¹ Peter denied ever even knowing Jesus, while Paul viewed himself as the “chief among sinners” because he persecuted the church before he was converted. By and large these people fill us with inspiration and hope that we too, despite repeated sin, failure, defeat and the like, can hope for genuine redemption and transformation. We too can be “successful failures.”

In my own experience I have noticed at least two problems that prevent believers from actually embracing their failures as a road to redemption. First, as Farson and Keyes observe, our communities, be they corporate or Christian, do not allow us to fail in the first place, or if they do the price paid is so high that it is not worth the cost. Some people construe the Christian life as a problem-free journey that moves only “from strength to strength” and “from glory to glory.” In this case the bar is placed so high that failure is viewed only as a negative, and the consequences are easy to predict: intense discouragement, fear, isolation, shame, and so on. Related to this is a second problem: Christians are famous for shooting the wounded; we punish failure rather than empathize with it. But Paul, writing from his own experience, reminds us that we all carry the Gospel treasure in our own very earthen vessels, and that none of us is worthy of or adequate to the task (2 Corinthians 2:16, 4:7). But God in His grace clearly can and does use our failures to move us to what He considers kingdom success.

Here we must pause for caution. Embracing failure entails several dangers. It can be a poor excuse or rationalization for sinning, as if we could not help ourselves. Paul warns us of this in Romans 6:1ff, “shall we go on sinning that grace might increase? May it never be!” Related to this, embracing failure might also contain an element of denial about ourselves, that we aren't as bad as it might seem, or at least no worse than most other Christians! For failure to be successful God would have us stare it straight in the eyes without denial. Finally, embracing failure might come across as cavalier, tempting us to gloss over rather than to learn from our mistakes. Still, thank God that He does not require perfection in us, and that the Son of Man, who experienced our every weakness and temptation, came to seek and save the sick and the lost, people like us for whom failure is all too familiar. For all those who complain that the church is full of hypocrites, I say, “don't worry, there's always room for one more.”

So much for “successful failure,” that is, embracing, learning from, repenting of, and then moving beyond sin, failure and mistakes. But what about “unsuccessful failures,” those instances in which people never recover from failure but are buried by it? How do we as believers deal with them or even ourselves should we find ourselves there? The Bible also contains numerous examples of people like this—Judas the betrayer who killed himself, Ananias and Sapphira who lied about their financial gift to the church (Acts 5:1–11), Hymenaeus and Alexander who “shipwrecked” their faith (1 Timothy 1:19), Demas who deserted Paul because he “loved this present world” (2 Timothy 4:10), and Alexander the metalworker who did “much harm” to Paul (2 Timothy 4:14)?

What can we say about “unsuccessful failures,” failures that appear to remain failures? Here is where our Christian thinking is tested. I think we need to say something here about ourselves and then about God.

This past summer in Austria I enjoyed some lectures by the British scholar Gerald Bray. Bray encouraged the audience to accept the fact that in your Christian life you will have problems, even difficult problems. We must do this because—even though you never hear this—the more we mature the tougher the spiritual life gets. Typically we view problems as a sign of spiritual immaturity, but Bray suggested the opposite. Embracing problems and failures, he suggested, is also necessary because “there is so much about ourselves that we do not understand.” I was reminded of Paul's very similar words in Romans 7:14–25 that end with exasperation and frustration, “O wretched man that I am!” So, first, we don't accept failure in ourselves and in others by making it contingent upon turning it into a success. That would hardly be an act of grace. We accept failure as part of our mysteriously and deeply fallen humanity and the nature of the Christian maturity and spiritual warfare. That's the bad news.

Here is the good news. John Calvin (1509–1564), the Genevan Reformer, makes the point that God did not love us only after Christ died for us. Calvary was not a divine arm-twisting to get a reluctant, grudging God to look beyond our sin and failure in order to love us. No, as Calvin says, “in some marvelous and ineffable way” God loved us before Christ died for us. Or as Paul says, God demonstrated or proved His love for us in that Christ died for us when we were still ungodly, powerless, sinners and enemies (Paul's four words, Romans 5:6–11). In theological terms, God's love precedes our redemption from sin and failure, it does not follow as a result of redemption from failure. Which is another way of saying that God loves us in all of our failures, whether they be successful ones or not.