Did anyone else notice #elonmusk Musk CONGRATULATING his team after his rocket ship 🚀exploded last week on 4/20? Congratulated. Yup. In the eyes of the rest of the world, another public failure. And he thanked his team.
How often does that happen where you work? How often do you congratulate your team when your project is wrecked beyond all recognition?
Naturally, the jokes were flying. “What burns up faster than a joint on 4/20?” “Elon’s rocket.”
So many of us would have had emotions like shame, embarrassment, rage, sadness, and guilt. We might have looked to blame others or ourselves or gotten overly analytical about every detail. This looked like a failed experiment in the larger business environment and perhaps in the scientific one. And yet he and his team were cheering. It’s funny how no one ever laments Edison’s 9453rd try at making the lightbulb. We’re just thrilled he did it.
Now consider how you would communicate this failure to others – inside and outside the organization. What’s the story you’d tell? What Elon knows about public failure is a lesson for all of us in resilience and storytelling. Failure is a critical part of the innovation cycle that allows us to celebrate every single piece of the process that did work and learn from those that didn’t. We can celebrate because that rocket got off the ground –a feat never before achieved with that weight for a reusable rocket [even if this particular one might not be reusable].
The agony that the team must be experiencing requires a level of empathy and encouragement from a leader that most of us crave but rarely get. And note how the story of this “failure” begins with a simple intention: gratitude. Writing a story about #SpaceX’s latest launch starts with the end in mind and a clear direction to praise the team, the tech they build, and the future that still lies ahead.
Say what you want about Elon, his blue checks, his doge coin crusade, and his political views, but in this case, his leadership to support his team amid an epic failure is an example of how you get your team to get up and get going again on the mission at hand.
What’s the next story you’ll tell when the chips are down?
PS: Good to know that this isn’t a one-off. Check out my interview on The Innovation Storytellers Show with Mike Pilliod, former head of Materials Innovation and how Tesla handled a big public setback, too.
