Do people in Northern Ireland have an undue fear of failure? asks Prof Simon Bridge.
In a recent article to promote Go Succeed – the new business support programme which is to be delivered by the Councils with funding from Levelling Up – the author stated that:
“We need to address the cultural challenges that prevent people from starting a business, whether that’s fear of failure; lack of knowledge of the support ecosystem or lack of local role models.”
I hope it is not a reflection on the programme but the article seems to include views which were once widely shared and convenient to accept but which often do not stand up to informed scrutiny. As an example looking for what is ‘preventing’ people from starting a business appears to assume that many of them do want to do that but something, such as a fear of failure, is stopping them.
Does the evidence for a ‘fear of failure’ come from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) which has for many years reported that a higher proportion of people in Northern Ireland than the UK average think that if they started a business they might fail.
But that finding has been based on a question asked in a telephone survey and the previous question asked if the person answering thought they had the skills necessary to start a business. As more of them than the UK average through they did not, it should not be surprising that, having been prompted in that way to think they were not equipped to do it, they then thought such a venture might fail.
There may be other surveys that have also reported that people have not started a business because of a fear of failure but in his book Herd, Mark Earls explains why this finding may not be reliable because people often don’t actually know why they act as they do:
“The sense of making decisions before we act is often (if not largely) illusory. Few decisions are made in the way we would like to believe. … We tend to work intuitively and without realizing it.”
Consequently “individuals are unreliable … witnesses to their own behaviour and to their own motivations”. So don’t ask them because they “cannot really tell you”.
People “will adjust the memories of what they went through to make sense of the behaviour at the same time. Our memories of our actions are often unreliable. The truth seems to be that each of us brings our attitudes and accounts of what happened into line with what we’ve just done. Do-rethink-believe, if you like.”
However it is also relevant to ask what a ‘fear of failure’ means in this context. Is it, for instance, a fear of financial catastrophe if they put all their money into starting a business which does not succeed or a fear of the stigma that might come from being said to have failed (or both)?
The fear of catastrophe might be mitigated if those concerned were aware of and followed principles such as these of effectuation which advises people not to put at risk more than they can afford to lose and therefore to find ways of doing it consistent with what they can afford.
Fearing Failure
A fear of the stigma of failure could be harder to remove as we use the word ‘failure’ both for something which doesn’t work but which, with a bit of prior thought, should have been foreseeable and so could have been prevented – and for something which when tested didn’t work but testing it was the only way to find that out.
The latter is actually a successful experiment if it provides useful information which could not otherwise be obtained – but because we use the same word for both there is a tendency to assume that all ‘failures’ are of the first sort and therefore deplorable. That is actually a failure to understand how to address uncertainty as we need a mindset which wants to improve and is prepared, when necessary, to do that by ‘trial and error’ as often the best way to eventual success.
Of course we want to discourage the first sort of failure, so a fear of it could be helpful, but if the economy is to develop, we want people to understand, work with and manage the second sort.
Nevertheless it does sometimes seem to be convenient to accept findings, such as that of GEM, that one of our problems is a high ‘fear of failure’ – not least as it offers a convenient excuse when business start-up policy doesn’t work.
That policy has often been based on providing support, as the accustomed method which is relatively easy to do, and therefore the mention in the opening quote of “the support ecosystem” is of interest as it suggests that providing support is still seen as the main way to influence start-up behaviour.
However in biology, from whence the term comes, an ‘ecosystem’ refers to all the influences on organisms in the area in which they live, not just the supportive ones – but the official policy view often seems only to recognise the support side. It appears to assume that many people consider the possibility of creating a business but are put off because they think there are too many obstacles – either from things which might be labelled ‘red tape’ or because of internal factors such as a fear that it might not work because they do not have the necessary skills or understanding.
Therefore attempts are made to simplify the process, to reduce the barriers and to construct a ‘support ecosystem’ providing appropriate assistance such as access to guidance, premises, marketing help and finance.
However, if the aim is to get more people to start businesses, then it will be helpful to know about the non-supportive parts of the ecosystem, the “cultural challenges”, which might actually be deterring them. For reasons such as those outlined, it may not be a ‘fear of failure’ or poor knowledge of the official support system that is the obstacle. Could it, in many cases, be a lack of motivation – because there is little in their situation which would encourage people to consider starting their own business as an acceptable possibility.
Alternatively, if they have considered it, why have they not proceeded? Do they actually know – or have they acted intuitively because of sub-conscious influences? Do we want to understand their motivation so that we could try to do something to change it – or is it easier just to accept a diagnosis of an apparently incurable ‘fear of failure’?
Mark Earls, Herd: how to change mass behaviour by harnessing our true nature, (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2009)
