Ninnu Campbell: How to Make People Fail

Ninnu shares her experiences and insights on the things people and companies do that get big stuff done or lead to the destruction of the company. She’s worked for startups and global companies, in highly regulated industries, as well as ones where there are few rules. She has a strong understanding of how to get the best from teams and how companies often fail their people. She shares the good and the bad and some frameworks to get the best from your teams and encourage them to fail.

Humans fear failure but some failure is essential to progress. How can you encourage the right kind of failure in your organisation?

Slides

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Transcript

Ninnu Campbell 

All right, hi all. I’m here to talk about how to make people fail. It’s something I have been doing for the past years. I put myself a little aspirational title up there because I also want to de stigmatize talking about failure. So I’d like to be one day called the Chief Failure Officer, maybe a Failure Founder. I don’t know if I got the founding game.

I’ve always worked on industries that have been innovative. We’ve been talking about disrupting teeth and breaking tat on the previous speeches. I worked with people and teams that have been innovative, and I’ve tried to help people in my organizations and become more innovative. And I quickly realized it’s not so much about pushing people to be more innovative. We all want to be innovative. We all are creative already. We all want to succeed. It’s about giving space for people to fail. So our success really depends on our capability of handling failure.

Failure is never easy.

I, for one, don’t want to be that person in there in the mud. I know exactly how that feels like. I’ve been that person down there in the mud. It feels horrible. It feels soul wrenching. When I talk about been talking about failure. I’ve and when we had the breakout sessions, there was a question like, do you have to really say failure? Because you’re not really talking about failure, right? We’re talking about learning. We’re going to get to learning soon. But the reason I want to talk about failure as failure as using the big F word here, is that it feels like a failure when I bomb a C suite presentation, right after that I’m not having a moment of accelerated learning. I’m really I’m having a moment profound failure, and I feel that I will never, ever have a presentation and never, ever talk in front of people, and also, in addition, I’m the worst product manager in the world and also the worst mom, so I can just build all of the things that I’ve ever failed in my life in that moment.

So what do we do when failure doesn’t because failure really doesn’t feel feel fun. It doesn’t feel easy. So what I do, and what we tend to do, is we don’t give 100%. We play it safe. If I play it safe, I don’t give it my 100% if I fall, I don’t fall that far. And if I fall it wasn’t really something personal for me, right? If I don’t give it my 100% if I don’t try as hard as I can, if I fail, it’s not insult on me. It’s just I didn’t try much, I didn’t try hard enough.

One of the things that is really scary for me is success.

It’s kind of like the same side of the coin on fear of failure, because if I succeed once, then people are going to think that I can succeed again. And the second success really starts to build up and becomes a horrible burden for me. So Mark, I talked to Mark, and he asked me to come here to present this, and we had a bit of a chat. And I kind of like realized that I’ve been on this journey of fostering innovation, encouraging innovation, to figuring out that it’s all about failure. And you know, our tolerance to failure, it’s all about safety. But then this, while I was on this journey, this whole pandemic happened.

Remember this? Suddenly we are all in each other’s living rooms, in our each other’s kitchens. You see, everybody’s pets, with their kids, their family happening, what food they’re having. We had a big like a difference work persona and a real life person, at least I had, before pandemic, that just got massively narrower. Massively narrow. It started to be okay at work talking about feelings, we had this collective fear experience of a global pandemic. And I, for one, hadn’t really talked to my team members before pandemic as a normal course of action. Hey, how are you feeling? Are you okay? Are you and yours okay? After pandemic, this became normal. We start with meetings, checking in on everybody. And I noticed the big shift on I was working on a big organization, big corporation at the time, I noticed the big shift in tear suddenly in our management trainings, we talking about psychological safety. I don’t think we talked about psychological safety about 5-10, years ago. Now, this is okay for managers talk about feelings. It’s okay for CEO to go on all hands call and talk about their feelings and their sense of loss during the pandemic.

My Vulnerable Self

So talking about feelings, I like to talk about my feelings. So I’m mildly on the autistic spectrum, so I have trouble feeling recognizing feelings inside of me, so I look at the symptoms. So when I feel fear, and this is all happened, by the way, and when I was doing this presentation for you all – is, first of all, I worry about disappointing people. I was doing first version of these slides, I showed them the Mark I was I couldn’t sleep the previous night because I was so worried about disappointing Mark. He’s going to go. Why did I ask Ninnu to come here? I was like, the slides are horrible, like I was so worried about that.

My second symptom is I procrastinate big tasks, not the small everyday tasks, but the big, meaningful ones. So I booked a call with Mark to go through my slides, so I do them, because I didn’t want to show her up there empty handed. I have a massive imposter syndrome when Mark originally I’m sorry I’m using you now as an example all the time, when Mark originally asked me to come and talk here, I said about what? I know nothing. I was like, Well, do you want to talk about product management? You’ve been doing product management for a while. So, like, I want to talk about product management. This place is full of people that know product management of lot better than I do. But then we, Mark convinced me that maybe not be true. And also, maybe I should talk talk about something that actually really want to talk about, which is fear of failure.

I don’t know if this resonate with you, if you’re having, if you have felt this and a fear of failure feels different to everybody. It’s not, not the same for all. These are my symptoms, and I had this. I’m not sure if you see in Game of Thrones The Shame, shame, shame lady, because it’s all about shame. It’s all about the fear of rejection that I am not good enough. So it makes sense that failure goes against our nature.

In ancient times, if we failed, if you failed, hiding from a lion, a lion, or running away from a predator, you were dead, so you didn’t want to fail. We have this profound reason to fear failure, and even not going back to being eaten by lions. Time when I was young, if I stood out, if I was different, I was seen as difficult, and I got easily bullied. So we have this defense mechanism that is ringing all of the alarm bells telling us not to fail. It makes sense. But like most of our defense mechanisms that have developed during our childhood, it doesn’t serve its purpose anymore. It doesn’t, we don’t need that anymore. I don’t need to fit in anymore. I can look different. I can go on a stage looking like this. I don’t need to have my child says, girls have long hair, boys have short hair. I don’t. I don’t need to fit in. I don’t need to be the same. I don’t need to blend in. I can be me, and I still have the same old defense mechanism. One of the little tricks I have, and I gave one of the presenters earlier as well, is that you can help overcome this, your old defense mechanisms, of course, through processing and sitting through your feelings, but on the spot, if you’re feeling nervous, level your breathing. Box breathing, for example – two seconds in, two seconds hold, two seconds out, two seconds hold, I do that. I did this before I came up here. I do that before I go to big executive meetings.

But experimenting is actually super easy. Even babies do it. We we are born without ability to do pretty much anything. We can’t even hold our head up. Babies are super learners. They’re super innovative. They’ve read lean startup book. They do, they fail, learn, adapt, and we encourage this. I’ve never seen a baby trying to stand up or learn to walk, and the parent going like, can you just not stand up? What if I just keep falling down? What is what’s so hot. Look at me doing it. I can walk.

But once we grow up, and once, especially, heaven forbid, if we start to master skills, we are not supposed to fail on them anymore. But we kind of all know that failure leads to learning. So if you’re a master of a skill, how you’re going to keep on learning, how you’re going to keep on learning on that skill.

So I wanted to figure out the possibility landscape. So I asked my previous job and my colleagues. What would you do if failure wasn’t possible at all, it wasn’t table at all?

So I get very obvious answers, of, I’d try out more you know, try out new things, try out different things. I’d take more risks, obviously. One that really a few that really resonated with me. One of them was, I was working on health tech side. There was speak up more. So we are in a risk of regulatory problems because people have fear of failure. We’re in risk of doing. You know, be doing not the best we can, not just on the innovation side, but actually not stopping us from making mistakes. Because people are fearing failure so much that they fear speaking up.

Another one that really resonated with me was have less anxiety at work. And we’re trying to make these safe spaces, safe cultures. People are feeling happy going to work, and fear of failure is making us more anxious at work.

And last one, I found the most interesting of them all. I’m not sure it wasn’t the most relevant. Wasn’t the most important, but it was the most impactful for me because it said I would be a leader. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t know any leader that’s ever got to the position or kept it without doing any failures, right? Leaders tend to be the people who do most failures of us all.

So can you fail where you’re right now, without it being held against you? Can you fail without blame and judgment? I looked into this on low trust cultures versus high trust cultures. Low trust cultures, it’s really hard to fail without it being held against you. You symptoms of low trust culture are you don’t want to be seen as a failure, so you rush to solutions. You get defeated by setbacks, and you’re lacking connection and authenticity.

If you’re having a low if you’re operating in a low trust culture, I want not to be seen. I want to blend in. I want to be one of the foot shoulders. I don’t want to risk ever appearing as negative, incompetent, ignorant. I hide in the masses and the crowds so that I will blend in, but so it’s kind of like I’m wearing armor and a shield like the storm troopers here, but like any real life, armor and shield, these blocks connection between me and everybody else. It blocks the outensity and empathy, empathy. So I don’t think the glorious city leaders had a lot of connection, authenticity and empathy towards on their work cultures.

So how to build trust? I’ve been talking a lot about failure and how we need to have more trust to have more capacity to tolerate failure.

If you want to build trust, is around you, is to give trust first.

To be able to give trust to people, you need to trust yourself. You need to give the trust in a way that is safe for you and the person you’re giving the trust to. Boundaries are safe.

Ninnu Campbell 

Learn to Rise

If you fail, you if you fail, it doesn’t feel so bad if you know that you can survive after the failure. So if you can learn to rise again.

Cultivate a leadership style that builds, create, generates trust around you.

If you think about what kind of leaders you feel immediate trust towards to not just by the actions but how they are, they tend to be people that have high levels of empathy and authenticity when they work with you. And then you look at the how they behave, so looking at the past, do they ever have level of integrity? Are they what they say they are for?

Brene Brown summarized this really well, something I try to remember every day is strong, back, soft front. So high level of personal integrity and the backbone to know what I stand for, what I know, what I am for, and at the same time, that allows me to have a soft front so high level of empathy and understanding towards people around me. I have solved many problems as a leader by just sitting down with people and empathizing with her point, understanding their point, because many problems are spoiling down and people are shouting because they feel that they are not being heard. So if I sit, sit down with them. Sit, same time, same side of the table, and we solve the same problems together, rather than being on opposite sides of the table trying to shouting match each other.

Once you have generated trust and safety around you, you can move the whole culture from culture of right and wrong to culture of learning.

We’ve talked I think it was Joe who mentioned on the first talk today, first talk yesterday, a really good point. It was about aligning problems. And my what I would say aligning problems from not execution problems, but exploration problems. Joe’s words were making things less scary, making them fun. Same thing. Making you model curiosity around you, so that people are exploring and there is less you don’t fail in exploring, unless, if you don’t explore, if you don’t learn. Another thing, I went to some improv workshops sometime back when I still lived in Cambridge, they have really nice improv troupe here. And the improv thing about always say yes. And I started doing that with my team. So I they asked me to do if they can do something, I said yes, and then I highlighted the consequences or the risks or the constraints. I do the same raising my child, she says, can she have some chocolate? I said, Yes, and then you need to brush your teeth. She doesn’t like brushing her teeth.

Building trust in regular meetings. I mentioned earlier, when the whole pandemic hit, we suddenly started talking about real life selves. So doing that, even after pandemic, and especially if you’re having online meetings, it’s much easier to connect to people face to face. But if you’re having online team. If you’re managing online people, I wholeheartedly recommend spending some time. I tended to have half an hour meetings maximum. If it’s online, nobody can really focus on a talking face on a screen longer than half an hour, and of that, about 10 minutes was connecting to a real person. So I had only 20 minutes of actual time to talk about what we wanted to talk about.

So I snowboard, and I when I go and try to do something new while I’m snowboarding, I don’t want to fail in a stupid way. I don’t want to face plant in the snow because of carelessness or ignorance, I want to face plant in the snow, preferably not. I try not to face plant in the snow, but it doesn’t I don’t mind if it happens because I explored a new route. I went somewhere to figure out new territory. I thought I could succeed. It wasn’t, for example, way beyond my skill level. I thought that I can succeed, but it was something hard enough for me to do, that I was pushing my skill there was risk present.

So not all failures equal, you can fail. Basic failure, careless, no ignorance and intelligent failure, about breaking into new territory, making sure that you are able to succeed, you have reward, significant reward, if you succeed on it, and also, you’re able to limit the blast radius. I wear a helmet, for example, every time I go snowboarding, because I don’t want to hit my head. I few times hit my head, but I want to hit in a way that I wouldn’t be able to be here and talking, talking on a stage.

Pre Mortem

Another thing I really like doing with my teams is to start with a failure. So I call it. It is called, you know, post mortem. This is pre mortem. So you highlight your project, and before you start it, you get all of the project people in the room, and you declare the project a failure, and then you and everybody will list all of the ways this project have failed before you started. And that way we can try to, first of all, find out all of the ways it can fail with people are not able to hide behind group think, or hide behind other people’s opinions or like I’m sure it will work, because Nino says it will work. This will minimize planning fallacy, and this will really help the team to think about creative ways that the project would fail. But we are unable, and we are able to counter it.

My Challenge to You

So yesterday, I had the breakout sessions, and I gave people a challenge. I’m not sure if people did it. I’m going to give you all the same challenge, and I’m going to give you another one as well. The on the breakout sessions, I asked people to go out and fail, because our failure and trusting the ability to rise, it’s a skill that you can learn. So the more you fail, the better you will get at failing. And the failure doesn’t need to be big. There is this person who is doing this great blog called rejection therapy. He did 100 days of failure. He went out 100 days to find out ways to fail in a very, very small manner. He, for example, went to McDonald’s and asked burger refill. Of course, he was told no one that filled me with dread he was doing I could do the burger refilling, but he asked from a steward, before pain plane lifted off, that if he could hold a speech. If you ever been worried about public speaking, and that’s a good way of practicing public speaking, because nobody’s wanting to hear what you’re saying and when that plane is lifting off. So this is my first challenge to you.

My second challenge is, and we’ve been talking all of this morning about making the world a better place, I’d like to jump on to that making world a better place train. And I’d want you to do something, and it doesn’t need to be again anything big, but do something that will make the world a little bit safer for you or for people around you, because this is if we’re making the world a better place, if we’re having more resilience towards failure ourselves personally, this is how we can help people to fail more around us so.

And lastly, once you do all of your cool failures and you’re starting to make the world a better place, you’re making safer, you are connecting to people authentically, empathetically strong backs of front talk about your failures to people. Don’t keep it in. I love talking about my failures. I’ve organized events in a previous organization I worked in where we just sat down for an hour and everybody talked about our failures. I’m not going to ask you to do that. That was Mark’s idea. And I said, I don’t want to do that. This is recorded, and I’m in a vague position of power over you, so I don’t want to ask you to do this, but I’m going to ask Mark to do this, because I would like Mark to join me on the stage and talk about failure.

Mark Littlewood’s Failures

Mark Littlewood 

Hi, Doc, you did give me notice about this, and I thought great. I went to see The Stranglers last week in Nottingham. It was great to our journey. Going with Violet, my eldest daughter, she got me a ticket for my birthday. I’ll talk about that. Two hour journey, less than a mile in, I’m almost pulling over. I feel so shit about. I just said to Violet, I want you to talk to me about my failures. And she went blah blah blah.

Ninnu Campbell 

Previously, Mark had told me, like I can’t think of any good failures.

Mark Littlewood 

So yes, I can.

Mark Littlewood 

I think I failed to address my relationship with alcohol for several decades. I love it. I’m a very happy drinker, never really kind of was an issue until it was and so I had to kind of face that, and I just stopped drinking, and that was great. But I definitely it was a failure, and so much as I just ignored it or decided it wasn’t an issue, and I’d say my life was better. I fail when I suffer from depression, experience depression to raise the flag and talk about it, because that always makes it better, and that’s the first step. But there’s something about me wanting to kind of just like dabble in my own self loathing and hate, and.

Ninnu Campbell 

Is this something, so, something you talked about with people? No, I’m good, and I saw the face you made when I said I didn’t sleep sleep at night before talking to you. So, like, I sense the level of sympathy. But these things, is this something that is easy to talk, for you to talk about?

Mark Littlewood 

Yeah.

Ninnu Campbell 

Or is it these failures? It’s easy for you to talk about, oh.

Mark Littlewood 

Yeah, no. I’m very I think, for one reason or another, particularly in this, this feels like a super safe environment for me, and I thank you all for that. I haven’t been drunk for four years far, I don’t know. I just thought I’d stop for a couple of weeks and see if I could do it, and kept on. And I think that was a good idea before COVID.

Ninnu Campbell 

Well done you.

Mark Littlewood 

Thank you. I think I. One thing that Violet said, which was one of the main things, so I never take credit for anything, particularly with the conference, and it makes me realize talking to people here and talking to speakers and hearing all the lovely stories you’ve either kind of come together secretly to flatter your way into my hearts. But no, you’re all very, you know, really important parts of my life and my piece. And I don’t really recognize what a I recognize how powerful this group of people is. I don’t really rate my contribution to that. Neil Davidson created it.

Ninnu Campbell 

So if you don’t give credit to you for organizing something like this, are you thinking that doing service or disservice for Business of Software conference?

Mark Littlewood 

I don’t know. I just feel like I’m like, you know, I’m the serf with an E, not a U.

Ninnu Campbell 

Do we think Mark is a serf? Yes. Thank you.

Mark Littlewood 

That’s good question, don’t they?

Ninnu Campbell 

All right. How do you feel after sharing fears? Do you feel nervous?

Mark Littlewood 

No, genuinely. I mean, I would. I kind of got over that sort of thing. I used to be so painfully shy, I left a job because.

Ninnu Campbell 

I should have picked up somebody on my own side with this.

Mark Littlewood 

Yeah, mine was Jed.

Ninnu Campbell 

I liked yours as an expert, I had a lovely expert on the breakout session as well as, like, Yes, I’m amazing a failure. Like, great. Good for you. I love it when you’ll throw it on the journey.

Mark Littlewood 

I guess I fail to learn from failure. Sometimes, if that’s not too meta, no, I mean genuinely super cool. I want to be as open as I possibly can anybody, because there’s that little thing that might make someone else’s life easier.

Ninnu Campbell 

That’s cool.

Mark Littlewood 

From another speaker at Bos.

Ninnu Campbell 

So when we made these, we call them messed up events, and people talked about the failures. Often, if you’re having something that you’re trying to hide and not tell anybody, it becomes your little own secret, and it starts to eat up you inside. And once you actually manage to talk about it, it becomes much easier for you to deal with it and see through the feelings with it. And also it doesn’t eat you up. It doesn’t use so much of your emotional and mental capacity. If I fail, if I don’t talk to anybody about it, it becomes my own little secret, and it just takes so much of my time and my energy to manage that feeling. So I tend to tell it immediately. If I fail, first person I meet, I tend to tell my failure. Some people who had been sitting on those failure feelings, they felt it really cathartic to talk about it. I recommend you trying it in a safe space. The reason I want I could call only Mark here, because I knew that he could handle handle this. But yeah, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.

Mark Littlewood 

Little more baby ones.

Ninnu Campbell 

If you want to.

Mark Littlewood 

I feel very uplifted by saying that I’ve said I’m not drinking.

Ninnu Campbell 

If you want to talk about your failures, I’m more than happy to listen. And also you can catch me afterwards, because it doesn’t matter who you’re telling the secret is, it doesn’t matter who you’re telling. It is anyway relevant to your failure. It’s just it’s relevant to you to talk about the failures.

Mark Littlewood 

So what’s your biggest failure?

Ninnu Campbell 

Oh, my biggest failure.

Mark Littlewood

So one of my biggest mean, you don’t need to talk about that.

Ninnu Campbell 

No, no, I absolutely do. I’m happy to talk about it, and I didn’t mention that I’m okay talking about it is so my one of my biggest failures is that I had a team member who was absolutely brilliant at their jobs, but they were brilliant in a way that was really under appreciated by the organization, and I could not get her the recognition that she would have needed to get on the kind of like, be the top performances. So she’s doing a steady good job. And this is like, doesn’t feel like a failure, but what was felt like a failure to me is once I left organization and she got the recognition I’d been trying to get her, I was feeling at the same time, so happy for you, for her, and at the same time so shitty that I hadn’t managed to do it myself, and I shouldn’t have had the negative feeling. I felt that was like I should have been just happy and happy for her. So that was the most recent this happened few weeks ago, failure that I felt like, and I’m more than happy to talk about more business failure, likes in maybe non recorded environment.

Mark Littlewood 

Well, yeah, we can always I did that absolutely, absolutely.

Ninnu Campbell 

All right, so this is the sign you’ve been looking for go forward and make a safe make the world a safer place and help people fail. Do you have any questions? Do you want to talk about your failures?

Ninnu Campbell 

Thank you, Mark.

Q&A

Mark Littlewood 

Steve in the back. Get one for John here.

Audience Member 

So just just to carry on with the theme, I was working for a startup, kind of in a co-founder position that I ended up in. I was there for eight and a half years, and eventually the thing ran out of money. Not really my fault. I put a lot of money into it, a lot of time into it. I was in a position where I had to just walk away. And it was, it was, you know, very, very upsetting at the time, but since then, I’ve been doing my own thing, not yet to product or profitability or any of those kinds of things, but the freedom that I have felt getting out of that situation has been wonderful. And of course, when you go through it, it doesn’t feel like such a good thing. It was, it was a real trauma. It was a bit, a bit of a sort of bereavement type experience. And I’ve been through a bereavement experience, so I, you know, saw it all again. But actually, that’s not the reason why I stood up. I actually wanted to say something to what Mark said, which is so I’m sure that there are many people here who know the history of this event, and Mark is right that a gentleman called Neil Davidson started it, and I was at one of the earlier of these conferences when it was Neil’s event. But after, well, I guess it’s about 10 years now, something like that, bit more. So Neil took a step back and kind of retired early, and went off to do art I think he loves and Mark stepped in. And the reason this event is as it is is. Sorry, because of the way that Mark had stewarded this event since, you know, from from Neil’s heritage. So I think I just want to say thank you for your.

Ninnu Campbell 

Thank you. That was really good.

Mark Littlewood 

Homer, where’s the hedge? Tom’s the B roll? My mic is not working, obviously, yeah, we’re gonna need some broken glass.

Ninnu Campbell 

I’m sitting down so I’m more level.

Mark Littlewood 

Who else? Mark, then John. John, no, go here. Other mic, here. John.

Audience Member 

So first. Thanks very much for the tour. I think it was wonderful. I had a follow up question, so with the teams that you manage, at what point I think it’s completely right the failure of obviously a learning opportunity, and I completely agree with everything you’ve said. At what point do you feel there’s a transition? Or when do you notice? Or have you had experiences where you can identify the wrong type of failure? And maybe there is a wider problem where learning isn’t going to solve it.

Ninnu Campbell 

Yeah, really good question. So two things, first of all, limiting the blast radius, so knowing when you can fail. I have dealt with the game. I manage the game. If the game is down a few days, nobody’s going to die, I will lose some money. So you need to understand what is, what is the risk we are running, running here, right? I’ve managed a product. If we get a number wrong, somebody might die. So obviously we are not doing fail, failure, failure, and adapt there. So knowing where you can fail and addressing that systemic issues is I tend to tell my team members, if you fail once, don’t worry about it all, doing intelligent failure, limiting the blast radius, doing your due diligence. But don’t worry about it. If you fail the same way second time, then we’re going to have words, and the words are not going to be angry. I’m not going to upset at the person, because then again, I have a belief. If that there is nobody wants to fail. People don’t go towards failure. It feels so painful and horrible. We want to succeed. So something is stopping this person from succeeding. And then we’re going to talk about what is the thing that is stopping them from succeeding, which is often, then we get into the systemic issues that is blocking failure, blocking success.

Mark Littlewood 

Thank you, Mark.

Audience Member 

So I have an observation and I have a question. So first of all, you talked about failure as a learning experience. I think to my one of our interview questions at the moment is, what’s the best what’s the best piece of bad luck you’ve ever had? Because I think we’re being unfair on failure to disregard it as it went wrong, and you learned something from it, because in my case, I failed to provide, to persuade the large company that I was working for that I had a viable software idea. If I hadn’t failed to do that, IDRSolutions wouldn’t exist, and I wouldn’t have had the last 25 years amazing experience. So I definitely regard that as a failure. That was not just a learning experience, but very much, you know. And we had the speaker at Raleigh who failed to make the flight on 9/11 as a result of which she was able to talk to us in 2024. So I think we’re doing we’re regarding failure as quite a sort of binary and purely learning concept. And I think a lot of the time, our failures are actually the best thing that ever happened to us with hindsight, and sometimes our successes are the worst things that ever happened to us. You know, the people who win the lottery and it ruins their life. So that’s my observation, I think we need to regard failure as less of a negative and more of a sort of at the end of the day, we judge it on how it turned out, rather than whether it’s success or not. The question I have it is, is your the way you deal with failure? It’s a bit like the way you know you deal with advice. If you have people who aren’t able to engage with the process, as Mark is able to engage with it. How do you help them with failure? Is my question.

Ninnu Campbell 

The reason I was able to call Mark out here on talking about failures, because what Mark said he’s feeling safe here. I wouldn’t have been able to pick on any of you all, because I don’t know if you would have been feeling safe, save me callings like, Hey, you come to the stage talk about your recent failure. That wouldn’t have felt safe for anybody, least of all for me. So if we want to encourage failure, we need to encourage safety. And if we’re having people having trouble talking about their failures, experimenting them, it’s because we’re lacking safety. Is my theory. By the way, I’m not the world leading guru or thought leader or failure yet. Thank you. Good one.

And second thing I really like with it, because the hindsight is 2020, when you look back at things and you go like, whoa, if I would have taken a different road, but you don’t know what would have happened, like it might have turned out really well as well. And I think part of it is – A. when we look back at things that have cascaded to this point in time, everybody who’s sitting in this conference, we have things pretty good, right? Nobody is here like, nobody is straight. We all have our struggles, but we have it on average, pretty good here. So when we are I’m talking to you about failures, and you’re looking back to your failures and going like, yes, they have really got me where I am today. Obviously, that’s one thing that we plucked out into these things, there’s people who have failed, who have really got miserable lives due to their failures. But it’s not largely us, because we managed to make something, even it might have been miserable for a bit, we managed to make something, something out of it, and that’s partial luck.

Another thing is, I think I have few thoughts around this. The other thought is, I think we actively forget the like small failures. Do I remember every speak I bombed? No, I don’t. If I would have bombed this one. I probably would have. Would remember it, because this was a big thing for me. Well, you failed to bomb. I’m so sorry, as I said to Mark, what’s the worst that can happen if I come and to hold a speech, I fail.

Mark Littlewood 

I gave you a load of things that were really bad that would happen.

Ninnu Campbell 

Yeah, you were really helpful. Thank you. But like smaller speeches are like trying to lead my team to do a project that’s long he passed the history. I don’t, I don’t remember I remember them winnings. I remember my success stories. I don’t remember my failure stories. Now, only thing I remember from from my failure stories is how they led to my success stories, how I almost flunked out of university, and all of that, how it led to my current success, so few thoughts around it. I like the discussion. I’m more than happy to continue this, by the way.

Mark Littlewood 

Is it better to fail in little companies or big companies? What’s the difference? As someone with the arc of experience.

Ninnu Campbell 

How it feels like is always the same, at least for me. Like I’m I’m down in the dirt, and my ex boss knew that if I fail, there is no point talking to me for the rest of the day. It’s just like, if I bomb a meeting, it’s kind of like, oh, wasn’t that bad? What did we learn from not in the mind state for that absolutely not, don’t, don’t come near me. I’ll bite your head off, but it’s a matter of consequences. So in big, small companies, even smaller failures can cascade to bigger consequences than big organizations tend to have organizational inertia to go to a certain direction. So that’s vague answer. Quickly your thing?

Mark Littlewood 

No, here you. Yes, you.

Ninnu Campbell 

I’ve lost count who is talking. Thank you.

Audience Member 

That was a really nice talk. And I’m kind of coming from very conservative family, and failed multiple times in my professional and personal life. What I learned from failure is like something which is called calculated risk. So whenever I try to explore, I try to go into any new horizon. So I try to calculate the risk. What will happen if I fail, what will happen if I want. So how do you take that? Do you have any suggestion the thing you also mentioned something like not all failures are same, so we cannot calculate risk every time. But do you think that calculated risk is a good thing when you are about to fail, when you have possibilities of failing?

Ninnu Campbell 

Heck, yes, yes. So first of all, it kind of like when you’re talking about your seeing what the downside is if you fail. That’s what I call limiting the blast radius. So if you everything goes up in flames, what’s the worst that can happen? I tend to, I have a personal trick. What I do if I’m like, changing jobs or something like that, I’m like or being laid off. So what’s the worst that can happen if I don’t find job in two months time, then I’ll go trek New Zealand for six months, and this is my worst case scenario. If I don’t manage to get job in two months, I try to make my worst case scenarios really, really good. That’s like, a little personal thing, so it really reduces my like then I don’t I’m not so worried because I worry about future so much I am, you know, yeah, worry about disappointing people. I’m disappointing everybody. I empathize with. Sorry? Yeah, I try to figure out, what are the what can what? What are the chances of different kind of failures happening around, like not finding a job, just having to accept a job that will make ends meet because I’m, like, low money or whatever. Like, you know, I try to figure out my failure space, yes, and I try to minimize, as I mentioned, the kind of like simple, basic failure. So I don’t want to be ignorant. I want to try my best. I want to try to succeed, and try to limit the blast radio. So pretty much what you’re doing, it’s spot on. You’re amazing. Well done.

Mark Littlewood 

Richard.

Audience Member 

Yeah, just an observation, I suppose, leading to a question. And I’ve been around quite a while, and I’ve been running my own business through the .com crash, the global financial crisis. Fortunately, no, not big time, but only there. But for the grace of God, my observation is that most of the fellow entrepreneurs that have been along that journey, some failed, some didn’t. Often, it wasn’t to do with some idiotic mistake or any other such thing, just bad luck or good luck or happenstance. But one observation, which perhaps applies to about 30% in this room looking at the hands earlier, I think it’s very hard to be an entrepreneur if you’re not resilient. And I think there’s an inherent resilience most entrepreneurs have, because all of us have looked over the precipice, and if you can’t sleep at night, you probably should reconsider whether that role is right for you. But that equally creates an issue, because we employ people who aren’t entrepreneurs and therefore see the world differently. And it’s interesting listening to your presentation, because many of the things you describe just aren’t how, for example, I, as an entrepreneur, see the world. But I have 110 colleagues who didn’t start the company, and they probably do wake up and do see crises and problems, and what if this goes wrong, and if that customer leaves, and what if I drop the ball here, and what happens? And I think it’s that aspect as an entrepreneur that’s interesting. So how do you manage when you’re talking to groups? Not everyone’s like you, and some people you know, but have to work with others very different. How do you counsel them?

Ninnu Campbell 

So to reiterate, so make sure I’ve understood correctly so people have different risk appetite, risk appetite, fear of failure. Yes, all I can say is try to increase your resilience, and I didn’t want to go too much into therapy landscape, but like working with you and recognizing your own feelings and all of that has been really important for me to, for example, increase my own tolerance to my own capabilities and abilities, especially the trusting the ability that I can rise again after a failure, has been super important on building my resilience, which also as the more resilience I have, more I can trust my ability to rise again, the less fear of failure I have more I can if I would have bombed this presentation, I like using this because I was recent experience. If I would have bombed this and I would have felt that I massively failed here, I know that world wouldn’t have ended, and Mark probably wouldn’t have hated me and yell, probably wouldn’t have hated me either. So kind of like, this was pretty safe space. I created this in my head as a pretty safe space to fail. Should that happen? I of course, again, don’t want to fail, but if I would have failed. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world. I would have been very upset, but I wouldn’t have been like I would have been able to continue surviving and next going and speaking again in front of the audience and all of that. Thank you.

Mark Littlewood 

By the way, my observation was to the average entrepreneur, I think they don’t say failure the way you describe it. They bounce back with more resilience, but they have colleagues who are different.

Ninnu Campbell 

I am not an entrepreneur, and I’ve never been, and I recognize it’s something that is probably not something that I necessarily want to do myself, either. So I’m more than happy to continue changing thoughts about this, because if I’m I’m usually talking in big corporations all hands calls about this, right? So we’re raising very many entrepreneurs there tend to be so.

Mark Littlewood

Final question, Chris.

Audience Member 

Yeah. Thanks very much for the authenticity and the candidness about the topic. I am an entrepreneur of 11 years, and I feel I fear failure daily, and my journey through it has probably been more of self development, because if I think back to my early my first four or five years of entrepreneurship, I probably wasn’t self confident enough to actually face the fact that there was a better way to deal with the fear. And having joined some other organizations that maybe helped with personal development, the kind of realization was this was an area I had to improve before I could even instill it as a culture in my business to enable people to feel safe enough to to discuss failure.

Audience Member 

Just a resource that I found super helpful. And I don’t know if you’ve done much, the reading is John Maxwell failing forward. For me, it was a book that really resonated. I read it quite early on in my entrepreneurial journey, and it just created a framework, I think, to build scaffolding on to kind of look at ways to deal with this. It’s obviously quite an old book now, but I have found it to be such a valuable resource, even in having conversations with members of my team, whether it’s at the executive level or even lower down, is to say, Go and read this. Go and Blinkist it just whatever it takes. Get comfortable with the content, because I think it is so valuable and critical to success. But again, thank you very much for sharing your your thoughts and insights.

Ninnu Campbell 

I think we need to book like put like book recommendations. There is the on the Bos chat on Slack, because I have, like, this amount of books about failure that I have read through about management practices.

Mark Littlewood 

Put them in the collaborative notes, yes.

Ninnu Campbell 

And I just want to highlight quickly what you said about you learned to be okay with your own fear of failure that enabled you to be okay with other people’s fear of failure, paraphrasing you slightly. So this is, this was the message I tried to send here as well, and I think that was a good underlining of that message, recognizing your own fear of failure helps you to recognize that other people have fear of failure and be empathetic towards that. Thank you.

Ninnu Campbell

CPO

Ninnu studied marketing and management at Aalto University before embarking on a career in tech, initially in marketing but was quickly drawn into product management and leadership.

She’s worked in a digital agency, Digital Chocolate, (the games studio founded by Trip Hawkins), in digital payments, medical devices and most recently at Astra Zeneca where she was a key driver of their digital transformation drive. While there she won the CEO’s Award for Exceptional Delivery in recognition of her work on digitising live clinical trial programs.

You can check more of Ninnu’s talks here.

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