Lee's blog: Preparing to Fail

One of my favourite podcasts at the moment is Elizabeth Days How to Fail – a formatted podcast where people (usually successful and famous) give examples of how they have failed and what it has taught them about life. It is wonderful, often funny, and poignant. I love to hear people talk about how failure has impacted them and their approaches to it as a learning tool.

An area that interests me is how failure is often a surprise to people, that it had never registered on their thought process or that the idea of failure was alien to them when setting out on a task or an ambition.

A “failure is not an option” mentality has its strengths, and it is a real requirement in some circumstances – my husband ran his first marathon last month and he did not have a failure option planned. I pondered aloud the what ifs on his behalf one evening and was struck by the way his plan did not even contemplate failing. This was not the type of cautious optimism that runs through my DNA this was non-negotiable to him. There was no fallback there was no Plan B (or C, D, or E!). He did it and I was so proud for him. However, it set me off thinking further about how I see failing.

A group of runners chatting before a race will often have an exchange that I refer to as “getting the excuses in early,” a sore knee, a terrible sleep, unbroken trainers will all be put forward to the chat in case the days race goes against the plan. The thought process being that in the case of a failure you are ready to explain and justify what happened.

The often quoted “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail” piques my interest. As a natural born planner, the first part of the mantra is almost irrelevant to me, but the second part speaks to me. How can you not be prepared to fail?!

Now I do not execute my life or career expecting failure – quite the opposite I expect that I will succeed and that my often-meticulous planning will result in successful outcomes however the first thing I do in every planning scenario (in my head never on paper!) is prepare to fail. I take a recent example sticking with the running theme where I set a goal to run every day for the month of September – before I had even started, I knew that the following would excuse my failure:

• I got sick and could not get out of bed.
• One of the kids got sick and I could not leave them.
• I got injured.
• There was a freak storm that wiped out all the running paths in my area……

Knowing that there were so many more factors that could contribute to failure than to success did not stop me from starting the challenge, nor did it act as a reason to not try - to my mind it simply allowed me to the luxury where I didn’t have to worry further in the middle of execution - I thought that everybody did this!

I like to think my planning to fail helps me rather than gives me an excuse – it allows me to box up my anxieties about deliverables and park them to the side like that extra box of biscuits you keep wrapped and unnamed in case you have an unexpected gift bearing visitor at Christmas (again its new information to me that not everybody does this!!)

I like to think that my planning to fail shows a vulnerability and an acknowledgement that even the best laid plans can fail and that by planning the failure as well as the success of a task I am forerunning the time it will take to deep dive on the what went wrong and lessons learned conversations.

I like to think that my planning to fail is not akin to planning for an actual failure, but I am so interested in how people who do not think like me think – Do you plan to fail or is failure not an option?

Lee is a mum, accountant, coffee lover and sometimes runner. She is married, has two young girls and works mostly remotely for a London based bank.

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• Wellbeing
• Careers