“In the run-up to President Obama’s speech to school children, NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” hosted a conversation with two high school principals. Both were clearly smart, empathetic, and hardworking. But my shoulders froze when I heard one of them say, “we don’t accept failure.”
Where would we be if Thomas Edison, who failed one thousand times before he invented the lightbulb, had been told that failure is unacceptable?
The reality is that that principal isn’t alone in his thinking. Our educational system, our culture more broadly, and yes — most corporations — demonize failure. Yet the individuals and companies that have learned to expect failure and to learn from it, are often incredibly successful.” –Jessie Scanlon, 9/8/2009, www.businessweek.com
During times of economic downturn companies must adapt quickly to changing business conditions in order to maintain growth, or often, to survive. There are many ways in which this agility can be achieved, but one of the most crucial is through innovation. In recent years, we have seen a growing acceptance of terms like “ideation” in corporate board rooms and management meetings. While this is a proven technique that can help to bolster creativity and in turn change the way we do business, one crucial element of why these types of methods work is often overlooked.
Look no further than commercials pitching consultative innovation. They poke fun at brain-storming sessions and situations where employees are “forced” into innovating – and then sell you on an outsourced innovation package. Innovation does not start in a lab, or with a survey; it starts with something that is much harder to develop, and even more difficult to change.
Culture.
Techniques for innovating are not magical, are not miraculous. They require a corporate culture which rewards trial and error, risk taking, and inevitably, failure.
Tags: Innovation
This is so completely true. Look at sports. in baseball if you get hit once for every 3 times at bat that is going to get you into the hall of fame. But in School that would be failure. If you were in the NBA and only his 50% of your shots you would be better than Michael Jordon. But 50% is failing in school.
Getting up every time we fall down is what defines success.
A wise man once told me. Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
What we learn from failure is so much more than what we learn from success.
Tim, what a great post. And very appropriate given our economic climate. As I’ve looked a different firm cultures, I ask about their attitudes towards failure and how they believe their leadership perceives failure. I might suggest “Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success” by John Maxwell, a favorite author of mine. It contains several interesting case studies, including a look at “New Coke” and how in isolation that could have been perceived as a failure, however it enabled the widely successful Coca-Cola Classic campaign. A quick read that I would recommend to anyone in this business climate.
Taking the conversation to analytics, is there a way to look at workforce data to get clues into a firm’s perception of failure?