A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new. Albert EinsteinOrganisations that have a habit of ‘shooting the messenger’ will discourage the process of seeking out failures. (Cannon and Edmondson, 2005)
The final question we are picking up this week is a really good one and we think very much relates to those we have answered earlier in the week. In a wider environment that has felt increasingly unsafe, and where people are probably being asked to take more personal responsibility, we should be creating safe spaces that allow for testing and developing ideas without feeling pressure that they have to work every time. As with other things we’ve discussed we’re probably more tolerant of this in our creative practices than in our organisational work.
Dawn
Being held in high regard by others is a strong fundamental human desire…people instinctively ignore or disassociate themselves from their own failures. (Cannon and Edmondson, 2005)
One thing that’s clear to me at the moment is that there are lots of ideas being generated, it’s partly why Susan and I took to blogging on such a regular basis. There’s not a lot of point generating different ideas, scenarios and models if we don’t accept at the outset that some of them are not going to work as we intended. The ‘failure’ word is a big one and comes laden with all sorts of baggage, I don’t think we talk about it or celebrate it enough. Failure is about learning not about castigation. It’s OK when we’re children, in fact it’s generally expected – you have to fall off your bike a few times before you get the hang of it. As adults we seem to arrive in a world where the expectation is that everything goes right all the time, and if not, we certainly don’t mention it!
The work Susan and I do together is often about trying different iterations, reviewing what’s happened, and adjusting. We feel comfortable with each other in that:
- We both share new sources of inspiration and opportunities as we find them
- We trust that the other is not going to use an idea or approach simply for their own gain
- We will not be judged by the other however hair-brained a scheme it might seem
- There are no ‘stupid questions or ideas’
- We understand each other’s strengths and develop our approaches on that footing
- We work on the basis of ‘yes and…’ rather than ‘yes but…’
- When things don’t work out, we reflect and review, we learn and move on
In short, we have created between us a working culture that feels generative, safe and allows us to fail without recrimination, blame or punishment.
We also follow a process that allows us to learn from failure:
- Identifying failure: we catch failures early while they are small and there’s scope for adjustment. This can be a simple as changing how we facilitated a meeting
- Reviewing failure: we discuss, review and reflect. We are constantly reviewing what we wanted to achieve and then what happened in practice
- Experimenting: we keep experimenting and trying things out. Between us we have a fairly extensive toolkit and we could stick to a tried and tested way of doing things, but we want to keep developing and that means we need to keep evolving our practice, and that in turn means sometimes things don’t work as intended
There are several things you can do to help yourself or your team members to fail safely:
- Start small: find a project or activity where the risk factor isn’t too high. Allow someone to stretch their risk-taking wings and experiment where the stakes are not too high
- Create boundaries: between you (or with yourself!) agree the parameters for the work and make sure they give enough scope for creativity and experimentation
- Develop critical thinking: allow your team members to determine the red flags, the indicators that things might be going off track, when they need to refer to you or others
- Embrace learning moments: as Susan and I have done. Build a culture of curiosity not judgement. Find ways to share learning and celebrate what has been learnt from failures as much as successes
- Keep learning: keep encouraging your team members to explore new opportunities, take personal responsibility and experiment. This is not about a free for all, it is more about calculated risks and following the steps above
Organisations that reward failure include:
- Google: Uses “post-mortems” to capture and share the lessons of failure
- Intuit: The accounting software company gives a special award for the Best Failure and holds ‘failure parties’
- WL Gore: The company that makes Gore-Tex has a fundamental belief – ‘action is prized; ideas are encouraged; and making mistakes is viewed as part of the creative process.’
- Nixon McInnes: the social media company has a ‘Church of Fail’ monthly ritual. Employees are invited to stand and confess their mistakes and are wildly applauded for doing so. ‘Making failure socially acceptable makes us more open and creative,’ says McInnes
Here’s an article from The Chief Happiness Officer Blog that gives some other great examples of responding to failures.
Susan
Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true. John Keats (1795 – 1821)
Failure is the flip side of risk taking, and if you don’t risk, the odds are you won’t succeed… Good companies embrace a culture of mini-failures…Nobody worth their salt hasn’t failed on a big stage. Tom Kelley of IDEO (Kelley, 2016)
When you take risks, you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important. Ellen DeGeneres (1958- )
Three quotes from three very different people living in different times but with the same message: failure is how we learn; from learning how to walk to getting a low mark in an exam. I have taught myself, and the learning did not come easily to someone with perfectionist tendencies, that the only real failures are the ones that I don’t learn from, the experiments that I repeat expecting but not receiving a different answer.
So how do we learn to fail safely within organisations?
- Try renaming the process itself. We talk a lot about risk taking in the arts, which sounds glamorous in artistic terms, but scary, especially for boards and funders, in business (and money) terms. Why don’t we talk instead about testing, experimentation or prototyping? That way the purpose of the process – to learn – is put front and centre.
- When you want to try something ‘risky’ think about what you could learn from it before you do it. Try and develop some research questions or hypotheses you want to test. Make sure you collect the data you need to answer your questions. Share your learning at the end. If people see that your risk taking had real value although the project’s apparent purpose ‘failed’ the ‘failure’ is lessened even if it does not disappear.
- Share the risks and possible downsides up front. In the excitement of a new project it is easy to underestimate the uncertainties and the dependencies on others whose behaviour we don’t control. Don’t import the rhetoric of selling the project in a funding application into your internal conversations.
- Think about how you give feedback within your organisation or work. If the first response to ‘failure’ on the part of leaders within in an organisation is criticism or blame, it should be no surprise that people stigmatise or cover up ‘failure’, preventing any learning taking place.
I find the ALUo framework from Creative Problem Solving model useful (Isaksen et al, 2011):
- Start with the advantages or benefits of what someone has said/done
- Move on to the limitations/disadvantages
- Think about something unique, new or exciting about what you have heard
- Offer suggestions about how someone might overcome the limitations you have identified. You must offer at least one suggestion for overcoming every limitation you identified. No overcoming suggestion, no limitation!
You can download some helpful thoughts on testing business models here for free
Let us know if you have any great failure stories, let’s celebrate them and keep learning!
Dawn & Susan
References
CANNON, M. D. & EDMONDSON, A. C. 2005. Failing to learn and learning to fail (intelligently): How great organizations put failure to work to innovate and improve. Long Range Planning, 38, 299-319.
ISAKSEN, S.G., STEAD-DORVAL, K.B. and TREFFINGER, D.J., 2011. Creative approaches to problem solving: a framework for innovation and change. Los Angeles: Sage.
KELLEY, T. and LITTMAN, J., 2016. The Art of Innovation. London: Profile Books Limited.