We know the lessons of Edison's light bulb. He had to fail so many times to get to what would work. We tell our kids to "fail and try again". But in our organizations, we hate failure. We like to win.
What if we could create an environment where failure is a part of the experiment and failing is NOT a stigma? How do we enable learning and take away the penalties of failures?
One barrier is that we see failures in isolation. How could we "open up" the "try and fail" process so that we can fail early and cheaply?
Our organizations like winners. We reward winners, often in big, tangible ways. Fails are forgotten, not talked about or only brought when we need to attack or discredit someone.
There are causes at both the individual and organizational levels.
How can we make failure fast and cheap?
One possible way is to have lots of failures and take a look at the set of failures (instead of one failure in isolation). Learning comes from identifying a pattern rather than just focusing on one stand-alone incident. So we need a way to track, collect and compare failues... possibly a way of categorizing failures.
Maybe some industries do this. Consumer Packaged Goods companies must have lists of product failures. Or do we just ignore these?
Hi Howard:
Your solution to the problem is good. When you take into consideration that the conventional wisdom says you need roughly 10,000 hours of involvement in something to have a marked level of proficiency, it stands to reason that failure will be a component. Current research indicates that to compress the learning curve and lower the risk of long-term failure, performing
many fast, simple, and inexpensive experiments is a key tool.
Eric Schillinger
- Log in to post comments
You need to register in order to submit a comment.