Failing forward: How our biggest mistakes often pave a path to greater opportunity

When Alison Kitchen was tapped on the shoulder for a lead partner role interstate, she was so confident she’d get the job she bought a one-way ticket. Then the unexpected happened.

As the now national chair of KPMG Australia recalls, it was the early 2000s and she was living and working in Western Australia when she got the call about a lead partner role for a global client based in Melbourne.

She was a partner in the firm’s Perth office, had a comfortable life and a great group of friends, yet, her single focus and drive told her the opportunity was too great to pass-up.

“I was so committed and confident of success I backfilled my role in Perth and bought a one-way ticket. There was no going back,” Kitchen told the 2023 Future Women Leadership Summit from Sydney.

Despite working tirelessly at the new opportunity, the client chose KPMG but not Kitchen. She found herself alone in a big city with no purpose.

“Every day I cried in the car going to work and sat in the carpark and got my act together,” she shared as part of a panel addressing ‘failing forward’.

“And every day driving home I cried in the garage and then put on my brave face to go and face the family that uprooted their life for me.

“I felt I’d been chasing something with such intense focus I was completely lost and had no control.”

She credits a change in mindset and a flexible approach to getting her career back on track.

During the process she learned some important lessons about course correcting. She also set herself a new plan. She gave herself three years to build on her reputation and new clients.

“I knocked on every door, took every introduction and took back control,” she said.

Fellow speaker, Anna Bligh was in university when she experienced a devastating election loss that spurred her political career. It introduced her to fear of failure, something that fuelled her.

“It’s what actually drives me to do better, it spurs me on to work a bit harder a bit longer… and put in more effort and to find a better way of doing things so I don’t fail,” Australian Banking Association chief executive told the audience.

Fifteen years would pass before Bligh put herself forward in a political ring. She would go into politics and at a high-point of her career spent five years as Queensland Premier.

“I absolutely understood, viscerally, that [by] putting my name forward there were two possible outcomes and one of them was [that] I might lose,” she said.

“Knowing exactly what that felt like, knowing that I had recovered from it, knowing that I’d had a happy 15 years since that terrible moment, gave me the strength and the ability to say ‘yes, I’m going to put my name on the ballot paper.”

At the end of her 17 year parliamentary career Bligh suffered a terrible defeat for the premiership in a robust democracy. A democracy she supports.

After her resignation, Bligh arrived home where one of her adult sons asked if she was okay. She said she was but was unsure of what to do now. He suggested watching The West Wing together with gin and tonics.

“We did that for two days and then we got on with the rest of our lives,” she said.

Mariam Mohammed had $300 in her pocket when she arrived in Sydney from Pakistan.

“I did not know that gets you one weeks’ rent in Sydney,” Mohammed, the co-founder of MoneyGirl said.

It was 2013 and Mohammed relocated to Australia to escape gendered violence.

“Like a ‘good migrant’ I thought that if I worked hard enough, if I got that degree… If I just worked hard enough then one day I’m going to have equal opportunity to my male counterparts, to my white women counterparts,” she said.

“And so I did. I did my degree… I was the youngest president at Sydney University, the first muslim woman to lead their student union ever. And guess what? I got rejected from every single policy role I applied to, which was about 70 of them around the country.”

In 2019 she took it on herself to “create her own table” and co-founded MoneyGirl.

“There was no room for me, or women like me in the rooms where I needed to be. Where I wanted to be to create the change I wanted to see,” she said.

“So I created my own space. I shouldn’t have to, but that’s what I did.”

Major General Susan Coyle AM admitted to turning up at the Australian defence force academy with a tennis racquet.

She had believed the defence careers adviser who said by joining the Australian Army “you can be anything you want”.

She learned quickly that it did not include playing tennis. While the sports racquet was not a failure of Coyle’s, her decades in the services has taught her to learn from failure. Particularly in potential life-and-death situations.

She shared a story with the summit about one of her drive teams who was entering the city of Kabul in Afghanistan when their car got bogged in a pothole. It was quite the pothole. She shared a photo of the silver $300,000 multi-armoured SUV. It had a severely mangled front.

Coyle said the team of men and women attempted to self-recover the car and take it back to their barracks. However, they should have abandoned it. She pressed that their lives are worth more than any vehicle in our army.

“When they came back, people said ‘you’ve got to send them home, you’ve got to send a strong message that they can’t do stuff like this and put people in harms way’,” she said.

“I didn’t send them home. We used their learning as an opportunity to grow.

“We learn from our failure and our mistakes and we focus on making sure we are teaching people how to respond, not punishing them when they make a mistake.”

For more from the Future Women Leadership Summit 2023, read why Dr Lois Peeler AM believes acknowledging the past is the key to our future.

PHOTOGRAPHER: MARK BROOME