If you’re a basketball fan that grew up in the 1980’s you’re familiar with the story that Michael Jordan was cut from the varsity basketball team as a sophomore. Sure, he was only fifteen and hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, but the overlooked part of the narrative doesn’t really matter. What does matter is how Jordan responded, using his failure as motivation to become even more driven in his quest for greatness, eventually becoming the best basketball player of all time.

We all fail. It’s a part of life. Some failures are big, while tiny little failures happen daily. As I write this I can think of a handful of failures that happened to me just yesterday. A couple were minor while one was very large, the type of experience that ruins your day and sometimes your week.

We all know there are lessons in failure, but how often do we actually deconstruct failure?

Are we embracing failure and using it to our advantage? Or, are we drowning in our failure and becoming paralyzed by it?

Revisiting failure can be painful but it’s an important exercise. The process of deconstructing what didn’t go right is a valuable tool to better understand what to do in the future when confronted with a similar situation.

The great military forces of the world have done it for thousands of years. As far back as the time of Julius Caesar it’s been a common practice to document failure on the battlefield to learn important lessons for future battles.

In 58 B.C. the Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Julius Caesar’s first hand account of the Gallic Wars, was written as a third-person narrative. In it Caesar describes the battles and intrigues that took place in the nine years he spent fighting the Germanic and Celtic peoples in Gaul that opposed Roman conquest. The Commentarii is one of the earliest accounts of a historical battle.

The Commentarii is a deconstruction of the Gallic Wars that gets into great detail regarding the tactics that worked and the tactics that didn’t work— essentially an early version of what the modern United States Military would call the AAR or (After Action Report).

The key to any failure is learning from the experience and ensuring that similar actions aren’t repeated in the future. The only way to ensure this is to evaluate what went wrong.

The process is simple. You evaluate “failure” by honing in on three specific areas:

Identify problem areas and areas that can improve
Propose measures to counteract problem elements
Obtain “lessons learned”

It’s essentially a personal inventory, or “taking stock” in our failure.

There is a natural business angle to the concept of an After Action Report and a great many companies have utilized similar tools for generations, but the process is even more powerful in your personal life as a tool to deconstruct individual failures and an effective tool for parents. A major parenting challenge is getting your child to see the big picture when it comes to failure. It’s a process I go through with my two teenagers. Like your typical fourteen and fifteen year-olds, they lack the maturity and to know failures that seem insurmountable at the time aren’t really significant in the grand scheme of things. Stepping back and getting them to better understand their struggles gives them perspective and coping skills when faced with similar situations in the future.

It’s all about not viewing failure as permanent, but to use failure to your advantage and institute a system to overcome your challenges.

I’ve written before about how important it is to utilize systems. In his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Dilbert creator Scott Adams discusses the value of systems:

“You could word-glue goals and systems together if you chose. All I’m suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at every turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their systems. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction. The systems-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavors.”

— Scott Adams

We’ve all heard the phrase “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The idiom captures the essence of utilizing failure to our advantage. It’s important to get introspective and analyze what went wrong and how we can use that knowledge to help us in the future, while not dwelling on the failure.

Acknowledge it. Own up to it. Build Resiliency. Move On.

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