The art of failing

Her new book, Bounce Back: How to Fail Fast and Be Resilient At Work is a self-help manual to give people at all stages of their careers the tools they need to overcome failure and develop resilience.

Perfectionism, she says, “is a curse,” and she describes herself as a “retired perfectionist”. Failure can help us understand ourselves better, and have a more realistic view of life — and once we lose the dread of failing, a more exciting one. “To have no failure suggests no imagination, no capacity for expansive thinking, improvement and originality,” she writes, pointing out that in the world of innovation and start ups “without a string of failures you are not taken seriously”. Even the most serious failures — a doctor who causes a death, for example — can be learned from, although sometimes the lesson is to start a completely new career.

Kahn studied anthropology at university, which sparked her interest in how groups in society are formed and organised. She worked at British Telecom for many years, running technical training teams, and the operations side of Heathrow airport. This was before the age of mobile phones — “a fascinating time”.

As her family grew — she has three children, now adults — she returned to study, training at the Tavistock Institute to use psychodynamic approaches to solve the problems of organisations. For her PhD, she observed the demise of a City bank during the financial crisis, watching the reactions of bankers to being made redundant as the institution struggled and failed. Her thesis was published as Death and the City, and applies psychoanalytic ideas about death and mourning to the workplace.

Ultimately, she believes that our emotional history comes with us to work, as much as we like to think of the workplace as being “uncluttered, straightforward and above board” and, until we understand how it affects us, we may find it gets in the way of our career progress.

Now, at 56, as well as writing, she teaches at Birkbeck College. She works as a mediator, and as a business coach. Sometimes, the roles overlap. “There often is a vulnerability that exists at the heart of most impressive leaders, there’s something there that they doubt themselves about, there’s a failure that they’ve found hard to deal with. So a bit of time to have space just to process the issues is useful.”

She lectures for philosopher Alain de Botton’s School of Life, which aims to teach people to “have a flourishing life, adopting those skills you are not taught at school, things like being charming, or having a conversation.”

It’s tempting to think that she’s achieved the success and balance in her working life that can be so difficult to find. But she stresses that she had her own struggles with resilience,” starting with that perfectionism which meant she put enormous pressure on herself. And then: “I had post-natal depression and it was very difficult to own up to that because I was a very lucky person with a nice husband and healthy children… it felt very shameful.”

She had a few “collapses” at work, which were “very humiliating to me but ultimately have helped me to be a more compassionate coach and colleague and also directed me to get help, to have medication when I needed it, to have therapy, to try and address the issues that were making me so depressed, and I now know how to manage it.”

Compassion was also something that Reform Judaism’s Senior Rabbi Laura Janner Klausner, gained from her “years and years” in the lowest streams at school, struggling academically due to her dyslexia.

“I know what it’s like to fail in school and feel humiliated and stupid, and when I think about the things that I failed in academically… it’s been the greatest gift as a teacher to be a dyslexic person because you know what it’s like to feel humiliated.

“I think I’m — I hope — I’m aware of the potential of pain that a person may be feeling, or embarrassment, so I don’t go around the room reading… I will always do what I call a ‘get-out clause’… ‘well if you can do this, that’s great, maybe you don’t know this’, not assuming someone has the knowledge.”

During the Gulf War, she was working in Jerusalem as the director of Machon, the institute for youth leaders from abroad, in Jerusalem.

“We made a decision that people who went home wouldn’t receive a certificate of graduation. It was a really bad, hard-core, old-style Zionist decision… it’s a terrible decision. I’m ashamed of it.”

She learned “to be softer – I hope – and to… never consciously or deliberately in any way cause people such pain.”

As a rabbi, she often counsels people who feel that they have failed. “Our job as accompaniers is to enable people to forgive themselves and ask for atonement. It’s the day-to-day failures of ‘what did I do to my partner, what do to my children, what do to my parents,’ that are the ones that suck people’s soul out. And you’re there to help them try and restore their soul.”

Theatre producer Katy Lipson has a philosophical view of failure in a risky industry. “It’s interesting because obviously it’s what you deem a failure… you can feel you’ve failed if your critics don’t like the show — even if its financially hugely successful — you can feel you’ve failed if you don’t artistically produce what you intended, or you could feel you’ve failed if you get great reviews but you don’t sell any tickets. So it’s very hard to know how many of those you need to tick to actually feel successful.”

In the early part of her career, she would do multiple small productions which would be a critical hit, loved by audiences —“but they wouldn’t be making money. So it was difficult for me to say ‘I feel successful’, because I didn’t feel successful. I was building a company but I wasn’t generating money.”

Now, having produced 60 shows in six years she says she’s learned from all of them. “There have been tricky productions which, in hindsight you definitely look back and you say: ‘this touring route was not right for the show’, ‘this staffing schedule wasn’t right for the show’, ‘this marketing budget wasn’t right for the show’ and, unfortunately, all those elements together produce an unsuccessful financial model.” But she maintains a positive outlook. “I could sit there and go ‘why have I done this for so long and not actually got my money back or earned money, but I don’t. I go: ‘I’ve chosen to produce in a very hard and volatile market to establish my brand’. Every single show, there’s a failure and a success story behind it.”

Failure can also lead to love. My own biggest failure came when I screwed up my A levels in spectacular fashion, and lost my place to read English at UCL. Instead, I got an apprenticeship at the JC, and a year later turned down a university place to stay on as an apprentice reporter. By 27, I had a job on the newsdesk of a national daily newspaper — my failure had made me work harder, fuelled my ambition and made me more determined to succeed in my career.

Then I met a man with a similar story of failure at an even earlier age. He’d failed his 11 plus and was sent to a secondary modern school, to be taught gardening and woodwork. He refused to accept the label given to him by a single test. He crammed for his O levels by himself (they weren’t offered at his school) and went to grammar school for sixth form. From there, he won a place at Oxford to read English.

We recognised each other’s resilience, and fell in love because of it. And, 25 years of marriage later, I’d suggest that failure — as long as you learn from it — is a pretty good basis for life.

Bounce Back: How to Fail Fast and Be Resilient At Work, by Susan Kahn, is published by Kogan Page. Elizabeth Day’s podcast can be found here.

Additional research by Aleks Phillips