‘The point is, you

failed. Now what are you going to do?’

Making Failure Resonate at Meetings

While the value of learning from failure may be clear, how to impart the lesson in a meeting setting may be less so, particularly if it’s the first time. Meeting professionals interested in introducing failure to their events should try to avoid blandly generic lessons in stick- to-itiveness and instead be narrow and focused, according to FailCon’s Cassandra Phillipps. And most important, keep the content honest. “Really push your speakers and be willing to take risks with them,” Phillipps said. “I get presentations weeks in advance and send notes back saying, ‘Get more real, it’s too aspirational.’ Speakers often take the easy way out, but you’ll get a higher- quality event if you’re willing to work with your speakers and really push them.”

FailCon speaker Mike Arsenault said: “I try to start with a bang: ‘We worked on this product and we spent all this money and it didn’t work out.’ That gets people’s attention.”

And surgeon David Ring, M.D., who has shared his surgery mistake with numerous groups, said that there’s “something about storytelling that really engages people and draws them in more than just numbers and concepts. The first time I was invited to speak about my error, I thought maybe I’d show some slides. Then I thought, that’s not what people want and that’s not what changes culture. People want to hear the mistakes and my story.”

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