No one is perfect. We all make mistakes. And because companies are made up of people, they make mistakes too.

One would hope that with enough planning and preparation, with enough people there to add their opinions and check our work, that companies would always get things right. But, alas, there is not a company out there who has not experienced at least one significant failure over the years.

So the question is not if your business will experience a misstep, but when. And what will you do when those inevitable failures come?

Don’t Plan to Fail, but Prepare for the Possibility

We never want to plan to fail. But knowing that failures do happen, it is a good idea to know exactly how to handle it when it happens.

Preparing for the possibility of a failure means doing a few things:

1. Have a plan B. No matter what you are working towards, always know where the exits are. When you have a plan B that you can easily pivot to, the failures can turn into successes.
    
2. Develop a communication plan. Put people in place to analyze and determine whether or not something is working as expected. If not, create clear lines of communication for those people to let the company’s decision makers know right away.
    
3. Be honest with yourself, and with your staff. Sometimes, when we decide to go down a certain path, it can be hard to admit when it’s not working. But in order to rebound from failures, we need to be able to honestly evaluate our decisions after the fact and be transparent about all decisions going forward.
    
4. Learn and grow. Part of being transparent means learning from past mistakes so that you don’t make them again. Companies that have processes in place to examine what went wrong and why are better prepared to succeed into the future.