Here’s a hypothetical:
You’re offered the lead on a project. You need X, Y and Z resources. Your manager agrees to provide them. You accept the project and begin. But after stalling, dodging, avoiding your calls and making excuses, your boss ultimately only delivers X and Y.
No Z?
There comes a moment when you could just let it fail.
Instead, by working both smarter and harder, you finish on time. You busted your ass to deliver a mediocre product and get no thanks, but your boss gets promoted for delivering a satisfactory result on time AND under budget.
Under budget?
Red-faced, you realise you just got played managed. Even worse, your peers are pissed because you proved to management what they always suspected: there WAS more blood in that stone!
So the question becomes, should you sometimes let projects fail?
It’s a weighty question because, no matter who is mostly to blame, some of it will stick to you. We’re wired to avoid blame, especially when your failure also drags down a team or (as it always does) embarrasses your higher-ups.
Unfortunately, your bad manager is still your manager. You can expect reprisals for robbing them of a win even if they were to blame.
This is especially true if your manager suspects you could have saved the project but chose to let it fail.
This post is self-reflective, a response to the currently-trending social media cries of “let it fail” which I believe are mostly short-sighted and dangerous.
Nobody cares why you fail!
You won’t ever get a chance to justify yourself!
Even if you’re not named and shamed, you will be blamed!
For me, the real question not being asked on TikTok is “How high the mountain before you’d die on it?” because IRL most of us need our job. We push the boulder up the hill each day, knowing it will just roll back down again.
But for everyone with a Sisyphean job there is a choice. You suck it up and keep pushing, or you let it roll and find another hill.
Winning is easy. The mouse-wheel-of-life has socially conditioned all of us against failure, so you won’t find it easy to fail on purpose or by design. To begin with, the calculus of risk looms too large:
You could damage your career.
You could lose your job.
Your reputation may be ruined.
What about your pride?
Et cetera. We’re conditioned to be failure-averse. It’s a hardwired survival instinct in a world where losers die in a ditch.
But what if we’re engineering a tactical fail because our ultimate strategy is success, a.k.a., “take one-step back to move two-steps forward” a.k.a., “lose the battle to win the war”?
We’ve all had ruthless bosses. “Never take a backward step!” mine once roared, ignoring my eminently-sensible logic that “Sometimes you need to go around an obstacle, not through it.”
He’s dead now, and I’m still here. His legacy is that you need to guard against scapegoating by ruthless bosses, peers and underlings. From him I learned that the best life-insurance policy is the humble date-stamped email.
God I love emails. All my important communications are written as if — one day — a hypothetical judge is examining them to determine the merits of my wrongful dismissal lawsuit.
It won’t get to that, but if it does I’ve already won, because I’ve “built a brief” that will sustain me through any workplace shitstorm.
Quick example: 3pm on Monday my boss receives an urgent request for information due c.o.b. Wednesday. She calls for a volunteer. I responded by email that I can do it if another (less-important) task due by c.o.b. Tuesday was deferred.
Her acid response is: “I’m sure somebody of your efficiency can do both” unquote. So I do both. But the important product was much less than it could have been — superficial, with no analysis or context, just a raw data dump. Because that’s all I could do in the time allowed.
Fast forward two weeks, and I get a “please explain” from the boss, who has cc’d me into the wrist-slapping she received for our shitty report. With a happy sigh, I began my reply to her higher-ups with “Per attached email…”
I know some of you soft-cocks will shake your heads: Too risky! Should’ve worked unpaid overtime to get ‘er done! No excuses!
Spineless jellies. Unpaid overtime??? Yeah nah. That would be un-Australian.
Like most bosses, mine thinks she’s the smartest person in the room. She’s certainly clever enough to know when she’s been outsmarted. End result? She wore all of the blame, but only because I let it fail strategically.
This tiny example shows you can insure against blowback when you fail by design, and that you don’t have to keep pushing boulders up mountains, let alone die on them.
