Organisations and brands are relentlessly making the case that they need to innovate or they’d lose their footing. However when asked “how do they treat failure in his organization many see it as something to be avoided. Innovation efforts are risky and can (by definition) fail. And failure can sting. So if you haven’t figured out how to take some of the sting out of failure, you won’t get innovation. Here are three tips to take the sting out of failure and drive innovation:
1. Start by defining a smart failure.
Everyone in your organisation knows what success is. It’s the things you put on a resume: increased revenues, decreased costs, delivered a product etc. Far fewer know what a smart failure is — i.e. the type of failures that should be congratulated. These are the thoughtful and well planned projects that for some reason didn’t work. Define them so people know the acceptable boundaries within which to fail. If you don’t define them, all failure looks risky and it will kill creativity and innovation.
2. Reward smart failures in addition to successes.
Once you’ve defined smart failures, you want to reward them just as you do smart successes. It sends a powerful message about what sort of behaviour is encouraged in your organization. An example is Tata’s Innovista program in which they award the best innovations of the year and the best attempts. The latter is called the “Dare to Try award” and goes the most thoughtful and well-executed failures.
3. Make your approach to risk taking transparent
As a leader, you’ve taken risks to get to where you are. You’ve had your fair share of successes and a few memorable flops. Share these with your people. Share how you approached both, how you made mistakes, how you learned to mitigate risks, how you dealt with the uncertainty, and how you succeeded. Let them see your decision process and how you weighed pros and cons. Let them know you’ll support them as they experiment and learn to take smart risks.
Great post! The irony is that success is something we report on, yet failure is often the thing that we talk about and use as an example. How often do we find ourselves referring to great examples of things that flopped…whether it’s your own failure or someone else’s, it becomes a model for ‘what not to do’. We are less inclined to innovate when we are only ever successful.
Success tells us what worked well, but failure tells us what doesn’t, and often by eliminating options we are able to find success.