Failure is normal. Failure happens. We may think of only one kind of failure – catastrophic failure that gets everyone fired – but failure is multifaceted, nuanced, and occurring right now in each of our organizations.
Failure is also not a “bad” thing. Failure is a mark of leadership and innovation in pushing the boundaries of what is possible and profitable when scaling from pilots to global programs.
Leading over a decade of Fail Festivals for company events has taught us that failure is not predetermined. Failure happens when organizations attempt innovation without well thought through processes.
How can teams can actively work to reduce the probability of failure? Here are six simple steps that companies can use to mitigate failure and improve the opportunity for success.
Teams should think through all the possible results that could happen from the project. Then they can document which outcomes they should actively work to avoid or welcome.
This process can help companies understand why they should welcome the experiment and start teams on the learning journey that will result from the resource investment.
The potential outcomes developed in the Before Action Report can be sorted to see all the ways the project could have positive impact, and at what points can the team claim a success.
Companies can realize that success does not need to be binary. Reaching 50-90 percent of the experiment’s objectives can still be a success, even if the effort does not reach 100% of their goals.
During every phase of a project, teams should have risk-free conversations on what isn’t going right, not to assess blame but to mitigate problems early and often.
This opportunity to increase psychological safety within teams can be an everlasting outcome of the experiment, and lead to trust and innovations well beyond the specific experiment.
Leadership can develop a fail-positive organizational culture where everyone – from the CEO on down – admits to failure and discusses what they learned from it.
Innovation – and its failure corollary – can only happen when both are discussed openly at all levels of an organization. In fact, a minimum level of failure is a proxy for organizational innovation.
Companies can budget and time for no-stress experiments – something like a 10% of projects by number or value.
This is large enough to get staff attention and motivation, new enough that investors will want to support it, but small enough that failure of any one project, or even groups of them, will not cause undue stress for corporate leadership.
Companies can share results of experiments – good and bad – across the organization and publicly.
Teams need to talk about failure. Mistakes that get covered up do double harm: first at the original failure, and then again every time someone else makes that same mistake – because they couldn’t learn from the first error.