Can you have a breakthrough without breakdowns?
A breakthrough can be a wonderful milestone in anyone’s personal life. But it can be a turning point for a business.
As children, we made several breakthroughs by age five. While those were monumental times, they were not walks in the park. Before taking our first step, we fell countless times. When we first try to speak or feed ourselves, we also fail. However, we never get discouraged. We stood up and took another step until we made a breakthrough on each one.
As adults, walking, talking, and eating is so commonplace that we give it very little thought. Once we master them, we move on to other advancements, such as tying shoes, riding a bike, reading, writing, learning math, to name a few. However, before we could walk or do any of the others, we had many, many breakdowns.
Before we accomplish anything significant, we experience breakdowns or failures. As children, we are not discouraged by breakdowns. When we look at a baby learning to walk, failure doesn’t seem to present itself as a problem or a breakdown. All healthy babies get up to take another step, even if they cry from the fall.
As we age and continue our careers, we aspire to advancements in salary, title, and prestige from the company that employs us. To achieve those professional benchmarks, we volunteer for new assignments, take on new and more complex tasks, and some focus on managing others. At first, we are stretched. In fact, our performance can be mediocre at best. During the learning curve, we make what are called mistakes. Except those bugs or glitches are no different than the glitches we experienced when we first took our first steps. Just like mastering walking, we too can master our runs.
In order to dominate our careers, organizations are committed to producing breakthroughs that differentiate them in the marketplace. Most trailers don’t have a blueprint. If it does, it is most likely an improvement on what already exists. Breakthroughs, on the other hand, require people to navigate uncharted territory. In that uncharted territory, there are bound to be plenty of breakdowns. Some are directly related to the service or product. In other cases, it’s the result or miscommunication, going over budget and time, or simply not having the right answers on how to take the next step.
Whether personal or professional, it seems the human experience is never flawless. Those who are brave enough to get through the collapse are rewarded with breakthroughs at best. At worst, they will have learned lessons that can only be learned through experience: look for advances.
While it seems counterintuitive to pursue collapse, it seems almost impossible to avoid if you’re committed to breakthroughs. However, no one talks about the intentional collapse they will create.
Perhaps mastery of breakthroughs has nothing to do with talent and intelligence. It may have more to do with people taking a stand for an outcome, even if they don’t know how to produce it. Thomas Edison may have summed it up best: “I haven’t failed. I just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Edison seemed to master managing himself and others in the face of multiple breakdowns. It was as if he knew that failures were part of the process of producing breakthroughs. If each of us has been dealing with failure since childhood, technically speaking, we should be masters at traversing failure to breakthrough. What breakdown will you create today?