How to Fail Forward
How to make sure you're not just failing
I hear a lot of people say “we’re failing forward” in ministry conversations. And while I want to believe them, if I’m going to be honest about my own ministry, I often feel like I’m just failing.
I think the difference between a ‘fail’ and a ‘fail forward’ is giving ourselves the chance to learn something.
The next time something (anything) in ministry doesn’t go as planned, or dies outright (that happens to me a lot), stop and consider a few questions:
What didn’t go as I planned?
Why?
What killed it? (And is the fact that it died a bad thing or not?)
If I were going to start over, what would I do differently?
I did this last year. I was hoping to engage high school students at a local donut shop before they went to school. It didn’t work. And by that I mean: I barely had an opportunity to talk to any students. There were very few spiritual conversations. My goal of making disciples of lost students was not realized in any way whatsoever. Why it specifically failed is not the subject of this post, but I do have a notebook with my key reasons.1
The first lesson here is: It’s okay to admit failure and stop. You will never succeed in everything you try.
But the second lesson is the point of this post: Taking time to think critically about why you failed… that’s failing forward.
Feel free to reach out if you want more details.