"Talk more about your failures"

Founders are increasingly writing long blog posts about their failures. Researchers Christoph Seckler and Erik Schäfer explain the benefits of this and how the posts should look in an interview.

Fuck-up nights are a thing of the past. Especially in the USA, founders like to write long posts on Linkedin and other social networks after they have failed. Some simply want to present themselves in a better light, others want to share their experiences with the community. According to scientists Christoph Seckler and Erik Schäfer, this can be a great benefit for the start-up landscape - if founders follow a few rules.

Mr. Seckler, Mr. Schäfer, you have looked at so-called post-mortem statements, i.e. posts in which founders write about their failure. This is not yet widespread in Germany. How difficult was it to find such posts?

Erik Schäfer: Fortunately, there was a website at the time that had collected such statements. We then only had to create criteria to determine which contributions were suitable for us. For example, it was important to us that the statements were written by the founders themselves. In the end, we evaluated 64 statements and looked at how founders communicate their failure in them.

Christoph Seckler: We started the study back in 2015, it was the result of a Master's thesis. What was striking was that most of these statements came from the USA. Unfortunately, the site is no longer online. There is now Getautopsy which in turn collects such statements.

In the meantime, the German-language version of your study has been published. So it took you seven years to produce an eight-page document. Why did it take so long?

Schäfer: Unfortunately, this is nothing unusual in the scientific process. For one thing, there were four of us working on this study, and the coordination alone takes time. And then the review process is very time-consuming. You submit a paper, receive feedback from the publishing medium after a long wait, then you revise it and it starts all over again. All this takes time. With this study, however, we have developed a timeless typology of post-mortem statements, so that our work and our results can also be easily transferred to the present and made usable.

What did you discover when investigating these genres?

Seckler: All these statements follow four categories, which we call Prescription, Explanation, Description and Affection. Translated into German, there are suggestive, explanatory, descriptive and emotional contributions. What all four have in common is that they aim to achieve a learning effect for the community. That was the most exciting insight for us. Such post-mortem statements are therefore a great tool for passing on lessons learned. Because there are mistakes that are repeated from start-up to start-up, for example that market demand is too low or that there was a lack of harmony within the team. If founders talk about this more, it helps everyone. I can therefore only advise the community in Germany: Talk more about your failure.

What type of post-mortem is the best way to report on your mistakes?

Schäfer: That always depends on the individual case. The most common was the prescriptive variant, i.e. Prescription. In it, founders discuss the challenges they faced with their start-ups and what they subsequently learned from their failures. In our opinion, this genre best conveys the idea of communicating a learning for all, because the authors give a lot of facts and figures. However, this type of statement often results in the founders bragging and trying to present themselves.

How does this genre differ from explanations?

Seckler: With Prescription, founders try to generalize their experiences. In Explanation, they only focus on their own case. The authors are not so boastful. They seem more apologetic and self-palliative. They often blame external reasons for the failure of their start-up.

What distinguishes the other two genres?

Schäfer: With Affection, the founders are primarily concerned with thanking their team and all their stakeholders once again. However, very few people make this type of statement. Only six percent of all contributions were designed for this purpose. Founders also like to use superlatives here, such as saying that it was the hardest decision of their lives to give up a project.

Seckler: In the Description genre, on the other hand, founders tell the story of their start-up chronologically. This is intended to make their decisions plausible in retrospect. It is therefore also a justification for failure. The authors themselves often describe their reports as a tool for dealing with their failure.

In Germany, a culture of failure is often still a thing of the past.

Seckler: That's true, even though a lot has already been done in this country through Fuck-up Nights. But let's be honest: eight out of ten start-ups fail, so as a founder I can of course keep to myself what the reason was, or I can help others not to make the same mistake. People with innovative ideas fail more often, there's nothing wrong with that at first.

You write in your study that such statements are also used to reframing the company's history. That sounds much more like justification than a desire to share their experiences with the community.

Schäfer: Yes, that is certainly possible. After all, companies live on even after failure. As long as we are talking about start-ups, they are not dead. Social media is a good platform for changing the view of a company after the fact.

Thank you very much for the interview.

About the people: Christoph Seckler has held the Chair of Entrepreneurial Strategy at ESCP Business School in Berlin since 2019. He conducts research on entrepreneurship and specifically on learning from mistakes and error management culture. Prior to his academic career, he worked for the auditing and consulting firm EY. Erik Schäfer is a project manager at gfa | public. He helps public authorities throughout Germany to master organizational changes resulting from technological or legal innovations. In October 2022, he will move to IU International University as Professor of Business Administration.