What do you share with others, your successes or failures?
In my weekly podcast I interview guests on their experiences with business collaborations. To level set, my guests first share what business collaboration is for them.
Then we dive into how they embedded collaboration in their organization and we build our conversation around that.
Business collaboration for my guests is either collaboration with outsourced team members or collaboration in the sense of strategic alliances and partnerships.
The reasons for collaborating and the tips on how to collaborate are similar across the board and is regardless of the size of the company the guest is working for. From solo entrepreneur to large multinational; trust, partner selection and communication are elements that come back as the main ingredients for success.
When it comes to lessons learned, without exception my guests share their successes and rarely their failures. Maybe it is the way I ask the question, maybe it is the way our society operates. We are used to celebrate successes and about failures we don’t talk much.
Somehow it is strange. The moments I learned the most, are the moments where something went wrong and where I needed to adjust my actions in order to solve the issue.
I discussed this last week in a conversation and my counterpart pointed me to the institute of brilliant failures. Here, failures are shared that lead to unexpected outcomes.
The original purpose of an effort fails, but leads into a new product or solution that becomes a success. As an example this is the way the 3M Post-it note was invented and the way Columbus happened to discover America. Failures with excellent results: brilliant failures.
So I guess in the podcast I need to ask my guests different questions if I want to challenge them to share the lessons from their failures as well.
How about you, have you been involved in a business collaboration where the original intend failed, but what led into a successful new solution?
What is your brilliant failure?