Failure is the key to progress – if only Whitehall could see it

Laziness, self-interest and inertia exist across Whitehall and Westminster precisely because those with ideas and energy are not backed to fail, writes Salma Shah

Gareth Southgate applauds fans after the Euro 2020 final (Getty Images)

We are programmed to believe that success is a consistent upward trajectory. We humans crave neat story structures and simple narrative arcs, which help us to find order in a chaotic world. If you work hard and have enough belief, you will triumph!

It’s the type of simple logic we like to follow yet the reality is so much more complicated. So why do we persist with the delusion? We should really get better at failure.

Failure is something to embrace; it is a catalyst that propels innovation and prompts reflection and reassessment. In tech-speak you will think of it as the Ooda loop, constantly looking at what goes wrong and ruthlessly assessing it to improve the process. Yes, we may still be reeling from Sunday’s penalty shootout heartbreak but look at the facts: England, against the odds, played in a final with an amazingly close result. This is not the type of consistency we expect from our national side because, importantly, it was built on a string of failures.

Southgate’s saved penalty in Euro 1996 started a chain of events that meant the England squad actually stopped regarding penalties as something we approach on a wing and a prayer and began to focus on them in training. The result wasn’t perfect but neither was Italy’s. Without Southgate’s efforts, it may even have been worse.

His management style, credited as being empathetic but cautious, is built on experience of failure, not just with the national team but throughout his career. Southgate had to bounce back from rejection on several occasions in his playing and early managerial days. He will also learn from this failure and will undoubtedly come back stronger.

The squad that fought so valiantly to get to our first final in 55 years is also one tempered by failure. Take the brilliant Harry Kane. He spent much of his early years on loan from Spurs instead of graduating to the senior team in any meaningful way. Failure builds resilience and a need to succeed. There is a reason that we love an underdog in Britain and it’s a reason you should never bet against one.

In business, too, failure can unlock answers. After 17 years of planning, Richard Branson finally made it into space and brought us a step closer to commercial space travel. The scheme was beset by problems, everything from funding issues to engineering challenges. But testing, persevering and learning from failure brought a success that was so efficient and smooth that, despite the huge leap that had just been made in the field of space travel, it was barely registered in the national conversation.

Politics would benefit immensely from some positive failure culture. Wouldn’t it be refreshing for ministers to give us information and be open about where things have gone wrong? After the last 18 months I think we’ve proven that we can handle complex arguments and bad news.

It’s not a reason of course to excuse incompetence but all too often we conflate the two. Failure should be built into all our assumptions and communicated as such; people are sensible enough to understand that the best intentioned plans can go wrong. Laziness, self-interest and inertia exist across Whitehall and Westminster precisely because those with ideas and energy are not backed to fail, so we end up being less than the sum of our parts.

Failure is an inevitability; blame is not. Our rush to criticise and our negativity is the first thing that should be checked. It exposes an unhealthy emotional fragility and suggests we are unable to pick ourselves up and move forward. Whatever the walk of life, in order to succeed we must first learn to fail.

Salma Shah was special adviser to Sajid Javid from 2018 to 2019. She was also a special adviser at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport