Is failure the new success? Vani Kola explains the power of 'why'

Why me? Using why in this fashion when things take a bad turn, is unhelpful. But there is another, more constructive way in which you can use this question when you fail, according to Vani Kola, MD at Kalaari Capital.

She recently wrote a piece on LinkedIn, titled 'Is failure the new success?'. In this piece she explored the importance of failure as a stepping stone to ultimate success. “Given today’s overly glorified success stories, we often don’t think of failure as providing us with immense chances to learn. But we must follow up failure with an in-depth analysis,” she writes. Focus on why you failed, not in an emotional way but rather an analytical one. Try to glean some lessons from it, for a better 2.0 version of yourself.

She suggests a method developed but Taiichi Ohno of Toyota backs in the 1950s. “In the 1950s, Taiichi Ohno, who developed the Toyota Production System, used the ‘why’ method to ask workers to reflect on problems on the shop floor. His method was simple: Just ask ‘why’ five times to arrive at the root cause of a problem. Toyota would go on to use this system successfully over the next few decades.


For example, if your digital marketing campaign failed, you could ask:
‘Why did our marketing campaign fail?’
‘Because we didn’t have a sufficient budget.’
‘Why didn’t we receive a sufficient budget?’
And so on.”

This simple method could give you some valuable answers. Try it.