Patrick's Blog

Why are we so afraid to admit to making a mistake? Failure, it seems, is universally seen as something to be avoided at all costs. In many companies failure is like a stigma.

In their book “The Innovation Paradox : The Success of Failure, the Failure of Success” Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes make a compelling case for failure as a necessary step to success:

The nonstop innovation that organizations need to navigate a changing economy involves at least as many so-called setback as it does apparent victories. In a rapidly changing economy, you are likely to confront as much failure as success. Does that mean you will have failed? Only on your grandfather’s terms. A new world calls for new concepts. [...] Redefining success and failure is an essential part of that process.

Using many great examples of “failures” turned success, they show that keeping an open mind about new possibilities, continually trying new things and taking risks are at the foundation of successful business. Many very successful companies today have forgotten about their early failures however. More importantly, they have forgotten, that these failure were necessary and valuable to get to where they are today. Successful companies have a tendency to become risk-averse. The more you have the more you can loose, right? This way of thinking is very dangerous in today’s fast moving economy. Complacency is at the very core of most failed attempts to restructure a business, to introduce new technologies, to make necessary changes to stay successful. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” or “It has worked in the past, so I will work in the future, too”. Statements like these can be heard over and over again when companies try to become more agile.

So what can you do to overcome this dangerous complacency? Create a culture in which mistakes and failure are accepted, demanded even! Start by asking yourself the following questions:

• When was the last time a project failed in your company?
• What happens when something fails? How do people react?
• What and how do people communicate if something fails?
• Are people trying to gloss over their failures to avoid embarrassment?
• Does failure have a negative impact on performance appraisals?

If your answers to any of these questions lead you to the conclusion that your organizational culture is not open to failure, think about how this affects your companies ability to innovate and to adapt to a changing environment. Agile organizations need to shift from fail-safe design thinking to safe-fail experimentation thinking. What does that mean? It means that organizations have to accept that fact, that trying to prevent mistakes at all costs can quickly lead to analysis paralysis. Being risk-averse and having a blame culture stifles innovation, employee engagement and generally makes workplaces pretty dull.

Now, to some this may sound like an invitation to sloppiness or a lack of appreciation for good work and diligence. This is not what it’s about, though. Being more accepting of failure does not mean there should be no applause for a major achievement. Nor does it mean that repeated, avoidable mistakes should be tolerated. Well intended and carefully planned efforts that produce mistakes are recognized as such, however, and treated as stumbles due to vigorous effort.

So how do you create an environment for safe-fail experimentation? Use an inspect and adapt approach:

• start immediately with the real work. Don’t make sophisticated long term plans.
• work in short iterations and incrementally build up.
• after every iteration hold a retrospective to analyze what has been working well and what hasn’t.
• decide on one or two experiments to try during the next iteration. Don’t run too many experiments simultaneously. Stay focused.
• in the next retrospective, investigate if your experiments were sucessful, if the approach needs to be tweaked or if the experiment failed and the idea should be abandoned (for a new one of course).

Honda has made a wonderful video about what failure means in one of the most successful companies in the car racing industry.

In the video, Takeo Fukumi President and CEO of Honda, sums it up nicely:

We can only make fantastic advances in technology through many failures. The idea is that you can fail 100 times as long as you succeed once.

In his wonderful book “The Art of Possibility” the world-famous conductor Benjamin Zanders writes about how the tells his music students to accept failure as an opportunity to gain insights, to learn and grow. He encourages them to adopt an attitude of saying “How interesting!” every time they screw up during practice or rehearsal.

What have you done to create a culture where failure is accepted? Please share your experiences with failure in your workplace and what you have learned from them.