Forging The Future Through Failure

Companies should encourage employees to experiment without the fear of admonishment. After all, it took Dyson 5,126 failed attempts to create its prized Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner.

Your company’s approach to failure holds the key to success. Let me explain.

Did you know it took 15 years and 5,126 failed attempts until Dyson finally made a Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner that actually worked?

It took Edison 1,000 unsuccessful attempts to finally arrive at the light bulb. He famously said: “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

WD 40, a household staple oil and water-displacing spray, was a successful formula that followed the 39 that didn’t work.

I could go on (and on and on) but you get my point. Sometimes it takes a few attempts to get to the right place.

This era of rapid change demands constant innovation, new ways of working, new products, new services, and new ways of building trust with customers.

There’s an awful lot of learning to be done. Failure is a valuable part of the learning process.

Why Punishment And Fear

There are two ways to deal with failure: punishment and blame, or encouragement. Let me explain why the latter is better.

Traditional management wisdom says admonition is necessary when things go wrong. How else can you stop the same thing happening again?

But punishment leads to a pervasive fear of failure, strangleholding experimentation when companies most need to build constant innovation into their DNA.

Blame causes a heap more problems than it solves.

Blame Blocks

A report from USC Marshall School of Business and Stanford University proved conclusively that the blame game leads to negative consequences for individuals, groups, and companies.

Companies with rampant blame cultures are less creative, less innovative, and less profitable than those that foster trust and psychological safety.

Blame is contagious. If leaders play the blame game, the behaviour spreads like wildfire across the whole organisation.

“If you’re a leader, don’t blame other people, at least not publicly,” advise the researchers. “Offer praise in public. If you have to blame someone, do it in private.”

The best leaders share their own mistakes. By admitting fallibility, they create a safe environment where employees can do the same.

True transformation has to start at the very top.

Share For Success

We are hard wired to believe our own ideas are the best ideas, but inviting multiple perspectives into the creative process is a smart way to avoid the blame game.

I ran a content commissioning scheme for the BBC in the late 90s.

Then the Web was fresh; it was a blank canvas ripe for experimentation and playfulness. The scheme, called Shooting Live, was looking for breakthrough projects that connected live performance and Web content to create new experiences.

In that brave new world, we didn’t know what would work and what would not. We knew we had to experiment and learn from experience.

Over two years we commissioned 12 projects that used a host of young technologies including streaming, 3D film, CCTV, and location-based. The commissioned creatives were far from geeks, and were willing to put their heads above water and push the boundaries of these nascent technologies.

To give them the best chance of success, we opened up the project development process to a radically different collaborative multidisciplinary approach.

But people are possessive and protective about ideas, and think their own are the best. We knew that overcoming this hard-wired reticence to open up the creative process would be demanding, so we contractually obliged our creatives to try something new.

Uncomfortable, the commissioned creatives pitched seed ideas to a room of experienced practitioners from technology, advertising, TV, media, artists, researchers.

The audience was asked for honest and constructive feedback and gave it in spades.

People respond well to being asked for help.

The process benefitted the creatives, projects, and audience alike. Everybody learnt something.

Compare this to the traditional design and development process. Teams hold onto their ideas, waiting for the grand reveal at the moment of perfect completion. The big ta-dah.

Imagine how many expensive mistakes could be avoided if players from across organisations were encouraged to lend their experience and knowledge to strengthen propositions and projects throughout development.

Collaborative development gives projects the best chance of success and avoids the damaging blame game should a project fail.

It is difficult to point a finger at any one person if a project lead has invited input from a wide range of stakeholders.

Embrace Failure

Organisations that clamp down on failure drive mistakes underground, alongside all those valuable learnings

Although it may appear almost blasphemous to a generation of Six Sigma error-elimination managers, embracing failure appears to get better results.

Companies like U.S.-based Intuit encourage employees to be creative, to experiment, without fear of admonishment.

“It’s only a failure if we fail to get the learning,” says their CEO and billionaire founder, Scott Cook.

Employees are encouraged to use a percentage of their work time to explore relevant ideas. Regular hacks invite intrapreneurs to develop and pitch seed ideas, and to compete with peers.

The events offer an opportunity for people to get to know each other, to learn from each other, to establish networks of trust, and allow important cross-functional interaction.

At Intuit, managers across all levels are incentivised to nurture and reward intrapreneurial behaviours and experimentation. There is no stigma attached to failure. If things go wrong, intrapreneurs are encouraged to learn from their experiences and try, try, try again.

Cook calls this “falling in love with the problem, not the solution.”

Regular events focus on failure, and every year teams that have dreamed big and failed spectacularly receive awards.

Better to have tried and failed than not try at all.

It’s easy for young technology companies to do things differently, you may say. What about the bigger global tankers? Instilling these radically different behaviours and management styles would be impossible, you say?

Not so.

Ten years ago, Coca-Cola’s chairman and CEO Neville Isdell made a shock statement at the annual investor meeting.

“You will see failures,” he said. “As we take more risks, this is something we must accept as part of the regeneration process.”

He knew Coca-Cola had to take risks to get back on top. He wanted employees to understand failures were a necessary part of the learning journey. He needed to set a new tone across the whole organisation and saw this highest level of platforms as an ideal opportunity.

The strategy worked. Under Isdell’s leadership, the company’s stock rose by nearly 20% in just two years.

Cultural transformation is led from the front.

I’d argue that the only real failure is losing the intrapreneurs, innovators, and change agents that hold the key to your continued organisational success.

To err is human. To drive mistakes underground is, in my opinion, downright stupid.