Peter Principal Failed Event

"There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought." Laurence J. Peter (educator and "hierarchiologist," created the Peter Principle, which states "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence ... in time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties ... Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.")

Similar to Peter’s dual theory to failure, I believe there is a dichotomy to the decisions that follow our failed events - love or fear. As an exercise, I challenge you to think about the last ten decisions you have made – the timeframe could be this past week, today, or even the past ten minutes. A few examples might be everyday things that you do around the house: mow the lawn, do a load of laundry, or pay the bills. Did you decide to do those things because you love these activities, or because you fear a nagging spouse, nasty letter from the homeowners association, or the decline in a credit score? When you make the decision to rise each morning, is it based on love or fear? Do you look forward to another day at your career, being the best employee, addressing your company's mission and feeling fulfilled? Or do you begrudgingly wake up (late, hit the snooze and go back to sleep), growl at the shower, scuffle through getting dressed, choke down breakfast and fight your way through traffic finally arriving at work to do what you can to avoid getting fired? This scenario is an exaggeration to make a point. Many of us seem to make the decision to go to work out of fear of losing a job and subsequently a livelihood. How about the decision about what to eat each day? Do you eat something you love (and possibly deal with an unsatisfactory result) or do you eat something you do not enjoy out of fear for your health or how you will feel later? We can continue this exercise indefinitely (or at least until you are no longer around to make decisions); it is valuable as an activity to remind us of our mechanism for making decisions. Now, can we imagine a world where more people make their decisions based on love? What would that look like? How and why would we choose to classify the derivative of a failed event?

Although some people believe identifying a failed event may be like pointing out the white elephant in the room, we have observed that these events are often misunderstood because we naturally want to put them in the past. Note that the phrase about the white elephant is associated with the birth of Buddha, whose mother dreamt of a white elephant presenting her with a lotus flower, which is a symbol of wisdom and purity. Elephants are considered sacred, both a blessing and a curse. They are a blessing because they are sacred; they are a curse because they cannot be used, but still need to be fed. It seems that our failed events could be seen as a figurative white elephant: seen by many as a curse, but without their blessing, we would have less success. We believe that identifying a structure which one can refer to when trying to decipher the concept of a failed event is a productive method for moving forward.