Last week, I had a terrific opportunity to speak at The Economist Innovation Summit in Berlin, which was a gathering of thought leaders across a number of industries and professions to discuss all things innovation. My session was focused on the influence and importance of talent and workforce in driving innovation. Invariably, we discussed the seemingly paradoxical relationship that exists between innovation and failure.
So for today’s blog, I want to take the “F” word head on. Not that “F” word! What I really want to talk about is “Failure”.
Interestingly, the very word, failure elicits the same visceral reaction as the other F word. We do everything humanly possible to avoid failure. We look at failure and success as binary positions – you win or you lose. We give our children ribbons for participating in fear of singling out winners and losers. Our culture rejects and shuns failure and yet, failure is an integral part of innovation, invention and success.
James Joyce once said, “Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” History has proven him right. Many of the greatest inventions of our time – penicillin, microwave, pacemaker, X-Ray images, and countless others – were all created out of failure.
When a reporter asked Thomas Edison how it felt to fail 10,000 times, he responded, “I didn’t fail 10,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 10,000 steps.”
James Dyson who created the Dyson vacuum cleaner after an incredible 5,127 prototypes said “We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, and dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually”.
In life, we only learn from failure. If you look back at your life, typically, you will remember the hard, challenging times as the ones that were most formative to your character, skills and experience.
It doesn’t just take failure, it also takes tenacity. Albert Einstein once said, “It’s not that I am so smart, I just stay with problems longer.” We learn this tenacity at an early age but somewhere along the way we lose the perseverance to continue on. How often does a toddler fall when trying to walk for the first time, 100 times, 1000 times, maybe more? At no point does he or she give up and say, “Well, I am just no good at walking.” No, they keep going. The average entrepreneur fails 3.8 times before they succeed with their first company. Most success stories are riddled with stories of failure on the journey toward success.
Enabling and embracing a culture of failure isn’t easy, but it is possible. It requires an approach to supporting innovation throughout an organization.
There are several companies and leaders who do this well. For example, Menlo Innovations has a banner at their corporate office that reads, “Make mistakes faster!” Brogan & Partners, an advertising company, has been giving out a Mistake of the Month award for more than 20 years. The employees vote on the “best” mistake and the winner receives $50. Ben & Jerry’s preserve the memory and lessons learned from mistakes in “The Graveyard” and Keebler Cookies & Crackers gives out “Mistake of the Week” award – born out of the need to keep the employees focused on innovation and encourage them to keep trying different, strange and cutting edge ideas to develop, promote and advertise cookies and crackers.
The key is in how leaders approach failure in
organizations. John C. Maxwell, wrote an excellent book, “Failing Forward: T
urning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success” in which he talks about the difference between leading and designing an organization tha
t is “failing forward vs. failing backward”. I am even reminded of the importance of modeling this behavior in my own home. I have two teenage daughters who are very driven and competitive. They are hard on themselves and often overly self-critical if they don’t score a perfect grade or miss a goal on the field. In a time where all industries and businesses are facing significant disruption and an intense need to innovate, I often wonder what behaviors, norms and attitudes we as leaders (and parents) are encouraging to embrace failure in order to innovate and grow.
Everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is to learn from them and as a leader to use those failures as critical junctures for learning, growing and innovating. Oliver Goldsmith said it well, “our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we do”. Leaders need to create a new definition of failure and create a culture that embraces failure. Viewing failure as a necessary element for innovation and demonstrating the tenacity required to pursue goals in the face of adversity is crucial.
I’d love to hear from you on this topic. What are you or others doing to promote and praise risk taking and failure throughout your teams, organizations or even families?
