Happy Wednesday,

Last week was about failures and premortems.  This week is about harvesting failure.

Pretend for a minute that you are a farmer.  Pretend that you were supposed to plant a field full of corn.  The crops start growing you and notice something interesting.  You have a lot of corn, but you also have potatoes.  You weren’t trying to grow potatoes.  They just showed up. 

At this point, you’ve failed to plant a field full of corn.  With that said, when it’s harvest time what will you do?  Will you only harvest the corn, leaving the potatoes to rot and fall apart?  Will you harvest the potatoes too and see what you can do with them?  Will you spend time analyzing the soil to see what happened?

What does this have to do with failure?  This week’s analogy is all about learning from and making the most of what happened.  I would hope that even though you didn’t plant the potatoes, you’d still harvest them and do something with them.  I hope you would spend time analyzing the soil to see what happened. 

We talk all the time about being okay with failure.  We say how we should fail forward and that we should celebrate failure.  What we don’t spend enough time thinking about is how we should harvest failure.  Rather than failing and trying to forget it, what learnings can we bring forward with us?  I’m not happy that I failed in various points in my career, but I am thankful for what I’ve taken from that to make me better.

The challenge: What will you harvest from failure?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry