Celebrating Failure

Summary: How does “Innovation” impact businesses and enterprises? In this blog - I will try to analyze various organization challenges which poses a barrier to innovation. I will address each challenge in parts so that readers can digest...! In two parts, have analyzed “Impact of Leadership on Innovation” and “Situating Innovation”. This Blog is about “Celebrating Failure.”

Celebrating Failure

In my Last two articles, Innovation, and the biggest impact of leadership and Situating Innovation have been analysed. Let’s analyse this further with “Celebrating Failure”.

This is one barrier – that most organizations have not been able to overcome. It is harsh fact – that the only way to measure success is based on the sale – revenue numbers delivered – most of the failures are dumped on individuals or teams rather than appreciation of team/ person taking the ownership and risk.

Sir Winston Churchill famously said: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.” But there are a couple of issues with this statement. The first problem is that Churchill scholars insist the eminently quotable former British prime minister never uttered these words. The second problem is that whoever did make this statement was speaking the truth.

Whether Churchill realized it or not, failure is an excellent teacher. The idea that success often happens quickly without setbacks is a fallacy. Often, success stems from failure. As IBM visionary Thomas J. Watson put it, “The way to succeed is to double your error rate.” As basketball icon Michael Jordan freely admitted, “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” This sentiment is echoed across industries and professions.

To understand – we need to highlight – why this is one of the biggest barriers of Innovation.

• It is a barrier primarily because of HiPPO effect and not depersonalizing the decision-making process. Organization needs to know how to deal with failure

• Instead of abandoning a failed initiative, if organizations can understand and learn from what went wrong then they will be able to improve their offer, product/service and try again and in turn; be more creative and thus innovative

• Fear of Experimentation is also another reason for this barrier. We humans are hardwired to ambiguity. people do not want to try new things because they might fail, which in an organizational context translates into not wanting to suggest new ideas for fear of making mistakes

• 2016 study from University College London showed that people find uncertainty more stressful than knowing something bad is certain to happen

Leadership who are aligned and know how to drive the innovation process – will not have this barrier of failure. Founder of Honda – Sochiro Honda once said - "Success is 99% failure."

Many Innovation stems from botched experiments. Post-It-Notes were created by 3M as accident, and it took 12 years to become a product which does USD 50Bn Sell worldwide now for 3M. Viagra is another such botched experiment.

What this means simply is - Organization must come out of this fear of failure which makes it overly rigid and passive, leading to problem solving that is safe, practical, and far from innovative.

Organizations need to not only publicly highlight courageous actions, but also celebrate actions that did not lead to positive results. It is not enough to give prizes at your annual meeting to the employee who took a risk and won – as this will get across to rest of the employees as wrong message - that they must get it right to be celebrated which will further increase their fear of failure.

Instead, Organizations should ask those people to share what they learned from their experiments, reinforcing the second important message, which is that learning from experimentation is the crucial ingredient to success. It is not ‘failing fast’ that counts, but rather ‘experimenting and learning fast’.

Organizations have to find teams who have failed and give them a recognition – send a message to the rest of the organization that it is not just OK, but necessary to try new things to Create a culture of experimentation and creativity.

The Canadian marketing giant Grey Group has a program called “Heroic Failure Award” that recognizes employees for their failures with their names engraved in a trophy. These organizations view failures and setbacks as progress towards something great—the next breakthrough or innovation that will change the marketplace.

Surveys with the people in Silicon Valley who are involved with innovation efforts, the striking thing is not their descriptions of success, but of the failures that helped them along the way. In Silicon Valley (and other hotbeds of innovation), failure is badge of honour and a pre-requisite for success—not something to be ashamed of. For these innovators, a successful company, and a successful career, requires a continuing series of rapid experiments, tests, hypotheses, and pivots—which means that nobody gets it right the first time (or the second or third). As a result, failure is highly valued.

In contrast, the established companies that I have spent most of my career working with are focused on executing what they already know how to do instead of innovating something new. And when failure occurs in the context of execution, it can harm results or reputation or create undue risk. So even when execution-focused executives say that it is all right to fail, they usually don’t really mean it..!!!

There are times, however, when failure is not a good thing, such as when you need to meet a customer deadline or achieve a competitive level of quality. Unfortunately, many managers don’t distinguish between when failure can be a valuable catalyst for learning and when it can be truly harmful, leaving employees unsure about when to take risks and experiment, and when to play it safe. For managers and employees, the key to getting this right is understanding whether the organization is in execution mode or innovation mode.