Learning from failure
Innovation can be marginally planned and controlled. Therefore, learning from failure becomes a critical strategy for managing innovation.
In few organizations or companies exists a culture of psychological safety in which learning from failure is rewarded. A reason for that could be the fact that every child learns that admitting failure means taking the blame. Among executives, there is a common concern about failure: if people are not blamed for failure, why should they work as hard as possible? However, failure is not always a reason for blame.[1]
Reasons for failure
There exist various reasons for failure:[1]
| Reasons for failure | Description |
|---|---|
| Deviance | Prescribed processes or practices are violated |
| Inattention | Inadvertent deviation from specifications |
| Lack of ability | The conditions, skills, or training to execute a certain job are missing |
| Process inadequacy | Prescribed but faulty processes are followed by a competent individual |
| Task challenge | Tasks are too difficult to be executed in a reliable manner every time |
| Process complexity | New interactions in a process, composed of many elements, let the process break down |
| Uncertainty | Lack of clarity about future actions |
| Hypothesis testing | Failed experiments prove that a design or an idea will be successful |
| Exploratory testing | Failed experiments expand knowledge |
Some of them, like deviance, inattention, and lack of ability, involve blameworthy actions. In other reasons like process complexity, task challenge, process inadequacy, or uncertainty, it is more difficult to find blameworthy acts. Failure from exploratory testing or hypothesis testing is necessary in order to gain new valuable information and can therefore be seen as praiseworthy.[1]
Building a psychologically safe environment
The goal of any organization is to extract valuable knowledge that failures produce. Accepting failure is not easy. An organization needs a strong leader to create a culture where people feel comfortable with learning from failure. The following five practices can help leaders to build a psychologically safe environment:
- Frame the work accurately. The kinds of failures that can occur inside an organization have to be communicated to all the involved employees.
- Embrace messengers. Show appreciation for those who surface questions and bad news.
- Acknowledge limits. Build an environment where all the involved people can speak openly about mistakes and uncertainties.
- Invite participation. Allow people to be involved in detecting and analysing failure, as well as promote experimentations.
- Set boundaries and hold people accountable. Leaders have to communicate what behaviours are blameworthy and clarify potential consequences.[1]
Key activities for learning from failure
Once an organization has created the right culture, key activities for learning from failure are detection, analysis, and experimentation.
Detecting Failure. Although it is easier to identify big and expensive failures, it is also important to spot tiny failures. The problem with these small errors is that people try to hide them as long as possible. Therefore, the goal is to detect them before they grow and become disastrous. There exist many methods to surface failures. Total Quality Management, high-reliability-organizations (HRO) and soliciting feedback from customers are only a few of them. Many companies have problems to implement such tools because too many messengers are afraid of submitting bad news to their bosses/colleagues. Another problem is that people tend to hope for the best and try to avoid failure even though it is scientifically and economically irrational. Therefore, in many cases, mistakes are spotted when it is already too late.
Analysing failure. After having detected a failure, it’s important to dig deeper and find the root causes. A leader has therefore to ensure that the wisdom contained in the failure is discovered. Failure analysis is often limited and ineffective because examining our failures is emotionally unpleasant and the analysis of organizational failure requires tolerance, patience, and openness. Another problem is that managers are not rewarded for thoughtful reflection but for efficiency and action. When people fail, they tend to blame external or situational factors.
Finding the motivation to go beyond first-order reasons and to find and understand the second- and third-order reasons can be a challenge. Interdisciplinary teams with diverse skills and perspectives can help doing this challenging task because complex failures are often the result of small failures in different departments and at different levels of hierarchy.
Promoting Experimentation. Another important activity to learn from failure is to strategically produce failure through systematic experimentation. Basic science researchers know that 70% or more of their experiments will fail. Failing is part of scientific discovery and is not optional in their work. Furthermore, all of these researchers know that the information that every failure produces is valuable information.
On the other hand, there are managers that use pilots and they try to make a perfect pilot right out of the starting grid. Later on, this tentative can inhibit the success of the official launch of the new product because such a pilot is designed to work under perfect conditions. Therefore, the pilot often does not produce knowledge about what won’t work.
Pilots should be designed to help the company discovering everything that could go wrong and therefore managers should get rewards if they produce intelligent failure.
Exceptional companies are those companies that want to detect and analyse failures and try to generate intelligent ones in order to learn from them and push innovation. Managers have to know that failure is a necessary by-product of experimentation. They also should know that not dramatic experiments with large budgets are needed.[1] New technologies nowadays make it easier to conduct complex experiments rapidly, cheaply, and easily.[2]
References
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