How good are you at failing?

As a player and a coach, I have endured my fair share of failure. We all do. Failure is central to cricket's core. A bowler fails, a batter succeeds. The batter fails and the fielding side is happy. A duck is the ultimate batting failure. One team succeeds and one team fails.

The best batters in the world succeed once every three to four innings.

That's a 75% failure rate.

With these numbers and experiences in mind, how good are you at failing?

Failure: My story

As a player I had an "allergic reaction" to failure. I hated failing. I feared it and tried to avoid failure as much as I could. On being dismissed, I would walk quickly or even run off the field as I perceived getting out as being the worst thing I could ever do. I didn't want the crowd to witness my failure for any longer than I had to.

My head would drop significantly, often rendering me useless for my team mates if I ever dropped a catch or missed a stumping.

Whilst some players would use their words to try and cover up their poor performance - he always gets me out, I hate this umpire, this pitch is rubbish, I never score runs on this ground, that's just the way I play, it wasn't my fault, I was so unlucky - I would go down a route of self loathing and negativity about my game, particularly my batting game.

This ultimately was the main reason why I hit my head on the ceiling when I got to first class cricket.

Failure for a high performing cricketer

High performing players (and organisations) are more likely to view failure as

"essential to innovation which leads to higher performance".

With this attitude, failure tells us that something isn't working and that there is an alternative adaptation which will be more successful in the long run. So let's take a high performing player having a session on the bowling machine, drilling his ability to judge and execute his defensive game in and around off stump to a series of 80mph+ feeds.

The player finds that his movement and leaves are excellent when the ball drifts into a fifth stump line. Everything feels and spot on. The result is perfect. However, when the ball is on off stump, he finds that his movement is not as fluid. He feels that he pushes hard with his hands towards the ball and the net result is a combination of "jabby" defensive shots with little control and edges into the slip cordon at catchable height.

The player sees the failures as an excellent feedback tool showing that his present method is not standing up to the challenge. Therefore, he will now want to test some different ways of tacking the task. He is effectively looking to test some different approaches to see which one gives him the best sense of control and outcome against the most probing delivery in cricket.

The player will now try a number of methods, with each one failing to achieve the right result. Eventually, by a process of elimination, the player finds an approach that fits the purpose.

This attitude to failure is completely different to the one I displayed as player. But certainly more akin to the way that I perceive and learn from failure as a coach.

Lessons from high performing teams

As Dave Brailsford, the ever successful Head of Team GB/Team Sky Cycling Director - fresh from a fourth Tour de France victory - says

"every error, every flaw, however small, is a marginal gain in disguise. This feedback is not regarded as a threat but seen as an opportunity"

Toto Wolff, the Mercedes Formula 1 Team Executive Director states

"We make sure we know where we are going wrong, in order to get it right".

This approach looks likely to take his lead driver, Lewis Hamilton, to three consecutive Championships and his team to the same number of successive Team championships.

Where is the evidence that this works?

This is a cricketing snapshot demonstrating how failure and success are intrinsically linked. For a fuller picture I highly recommend looking at Matthew Syed's outstanding book "Black Box Thinking".

Remember: Cricket is a game of failure.

So as a player or as a coach can you afford not to be better at failing?