Like many people, I spent last Wednesday evening watching England's World Cup semi-final against Argentina. The result wasn't what England wanted, and it got me thinking about a question that comes up in sport, in work, and in life generally.
If you don't achieve the outcome you wanted, have you failed?
A few years ago, basketball player Giannis Antetokounmpo (‘The Greek Freak’) was asked exactly that question after his team had been knocked out of the NBA playoffs. A reporter asked him whether he viewed the season as a failure because they hadn’t won the championship. He visibly bristled, and his response has been viewed millions of times since.
He responded: "There is no failure in sports, There's good days, bad days. Some days you are able to be successful, some days you are not. Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships... the other nine years was a failure?"
He wasn’t saying results don't matter. Of course they matter. But success is not simply defined by whether you win the trophy. It's about whether you improved, whether you learned, whether you gave everything you could, and whether you put yourself in a position to come back stronger next time.
He described victory and defeat not as opposites, but as part of the same journey: “It's not a failure, it's steps to success."
I think there is a useful lesson in that for all of us.
When I meet new colleagues during induction, I often talk about what can feel like a slight tension between two of our values. On the one hand, we want to ‘strive to be the best’. That's important. We want to be ambitious. We want to challenge ourselves. Our customers want us to keep improving and never become complacent.
But sitting alongside that is another value: ‘value each other’. The Coastline values framework places both alongside each other. So our values don’t just talk about our commitment to striving for high performance and improvement, but how we do that, by supporting colleagues, and avoiding blame when things go wrong.
The challenge is getting the balance right. If we become too focused on outcomes, we can end up judging ourselves and others entirely on whether we achieved a particular result. We risk forgetting that there are some things we control and some things we don't.
The psychiatrist Professor Steve Peters, who has worked with elite sportspeople including Ronnie O'Sullivan, Chris Hoy and a number of Olympic and national teams, has spent much of his career helping people focus on what they can control rather than becoming consumed by what they cannot. He advises people on how to avoid being controlled by their ‘inner chimp’, emphasising that preparation, effort, behaviours, and decision making are all within our gift (if we practise!). The final result often isn't.
That is a useful perspective for us. There are many things we can control at Coastline, and most of them sit within our values. We can put customers first. We can be open, honest and accountable. We can strive to be the best through continuous improvement and hard work. And we can value each other, especially when things don't go quite as planned.
What we cannot always control is the final result. We can do all of those things well and still face setbacks, disappointments or challenges outside our control. That doesn't mean we have failed. It means we keep learning, keep improving and keep going.
The housing crisis is perhaps the clearest example. If success were measured solely by whether Coastline has solved Cornwall's housing crisis, then we would all have to admit we haven't achieved that, and that we probably never will. The scale of the challenge is simply too great for any single organisation.
But does that mean we have failed? I don't think so. Every home we build matters. Every customer we help matters. Every repair completed, every piece of advice given, every difficult situation resolved and every person supported through a challenging period matters. We may not solve the housing crisis on our own, but every positive thing we do makes that crisis a little smaller for someone.
But we also need to remember that success is not only measured by the scoreboard. Sometimes it is measured by whether we did the right things, in the right way, for the right reasons. If we can say yes to that, then I think we can hold our heads high, regardless of the final result.
Which leaves me with one final question. What's more likely: an end to the housing crisis in Cornwall, or England winning the World Cup?