We
instinctively know that getting things wrong is just part of everyday life and
learning so why is it so different in our business or work life?
Traditionally
careers are built on success. The more successes you have the more your earning
potential, the faster you rise the ranks and the better your professional
reputation becomes.
Herein lies
the rub! No one actually wants to admit they fouled up. Its tantamount to admitting that YOU are a failure
and really who wants to do that?
We all have
those (often subconscious) internal conversations with ourselves. You know the
way it goes? ‘I messed that up, I'm going to miss that goal, I wont get that
bonus, promotion, my colleagues will think I'm useless and so it goes on until
you take the scenario to the worst possible conclusion and you are homeless and
destitute!
It sounds farfetched
but on some level or another we all tend to opt for the safe, tried and tested
route rather than take that risk, however small.
Homer is
right. The only way to avoid failure is to do nothing. But failure has its benefits,
and is probably impossible to avoid. Indeed, doing nothing is a form of failure
too.
Its
basically down to our attitude towards failure, how we personally embrace it and
as an organisation how we choose to handle it.
Thomas
Edison famously ‘re framed’ how he viewed failure when he said:
Likewise James
Dyson failed on an epic scale when he took five years and 5127 failed prototype
to develop on that worked
Many
organisations preach about failing
forward, failing early and failing often, and use a host of other terms (fail
fast, sharing practice etc) to talk about the good things that happen when
things go badly. While many organisation preach about 'honouring' failure many still don't actively practice what they preach.
Its
impossible to run an organization without making a lot of mistakes. Innovation
always entails failure and if you want creativity without failure, you are living in a
fool’s paradise. It is also impossible to learn something new without
making mistakes.
Failure will
never be eliminated, and so the best we can hope for from human beings and
organizations is that they learn from their mistakes, that rather than making
the same mistakes over and over again, they make new and different mistakes.
The best
diagnostic to see if an organization is innovating, learning, and capable of
turning knowledge into action is “What happens when they make a mistake?”
So here are
some of the usual attitudes organisations take towards failure:
“Forgive and
forget,” which may be temporarily comforting, but condemns people and systems
to make the same mistakes over and over again. The behaviour this encourages is
one where the mistakes get buried and we simply don’t talk about it again.
‘The unforgiving’ This is where an
organisation remembers who made mistakes, chases them down, humiliates them.
The culture this promotes is one where a climate of fear prevails. In such
situations, the game becomes avoiding the finger of blame rather than
surfacing, understanding, and fixing mistakes
‘Forgive
& remember’ is the philosophy that the best teams and organizations use.
You forgive because you know its impossible to run an organization
without making mistakes, and pointing fingers and holding grudges creates a
climate of fear. You remember – and talk about the mistakes openly –so
people and the system can learn. And you remember so that, even though you have
tried to retrain people and teach them, if some people keep making the same
mistakes over and over again, then, well, they need to be moved to another kind
of job.
The museum of failed products
What would you do?
Does this sound familiar? Funny clip about running a Teleconference.
