10 reasons why everything you’ll ever do fails

I’ve been asked a lot, why stuff fails, goes wrong or escalates. Here are my top 10 reasons I come up with to tell people:

Let’s start a great top ten list. Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash

1. You don’t know what “doing” looks like. You come up with your project, have a great vision and after playing around and thinking a lot, the idea slowly vanishes. That’s probably because you’re overwhelmed by the scope of your idea and can’t even figure out where to start. Maybe start thinking about what the first achievable step towards your goal can look like. And repeat until you reached your goal.
2. Fundamental attribution error. Other people are always wrong. You aren’t. In your case, it’s the circumstances fault. And everybody will tell you a similar story from their perspective. This mindset won’t support you to reflect because you won’t start looking for errors in your own behavior. Start being aware of this fact.
3. You blame failure on your tools. That’s the basic excuse I hear daily from teams. Our framework doesn’t support this or that, our processes couldn’t handle those extra request from our client… bla bla… wrong. If I learned one thing, it’s never the tools or frameworks that are to blame. It’s usually a few levels lower, e.g. the means and habits in communication you apply, that cause failure.
4. Nostalgia. The good old days. Call it as you wish. They might have been cool and a lot of stuff might have worked there, too. It’s usually because the complexity of what you had to do was lower. Be it school vs. university or the startup days vs. scaling a company, or whatever else. It’s harder to find easy solutions in complex environments. But take it as a challenge and don’t cry because the old days are over. Cheer because you have chances to learn!
5. Getting stuck. This one adds up with nostalgia. You probably have done things a million time similarly but the million-and-first time it suddenly didn’t work anymore. Or image you’ve got a new colleague who brings in a different perspective and consequently a different approach to challenges you’ve been stuck with forever. Don’t tell them their take on things won’t work. Observe and learn!
6. Only taking time for doing. You should also take time to reflect on what you’ve done. This gives you the chance to look at your progress from different angles and maybe even come up with a couple of new ideas to improve how you’re doing stuff. Reflect!!!
7. Writing lists. I’m not even sure why I’m writing this article right now. Dominic and I just came up with this idea for fun as we were looking at our previous articles.
8. Reading clickbait headlines. This is a tricky one. Because reading these headlines can lead to reason number nine why everything you’ll ever do fails.
9. Reading the articles behind these headlines. Don’t do it. Just don’t.
10. Asking how and what before why. This is a common problem, I face daily, e.g. in agile transitions. It’s easier for people to tell their teams that they should use Scrum (how) and use its methods, e.g. retrospectives (what), than to truly answer the why question. Maybe Simon Sinek knows the answer why this is so hard. Instead of reading this article, maybe you should read a little about the golden circle. Otherwise, you’ll never be agile enough.