Failure is the Flipside of Innovation

True ingenuity and innovation require organizations and their people to have the courage to fail.  Albert Einstein once said, “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”.  To continually fear making mistakes is detrimental to success and progress.

Most of us are comfortable with the notion of experimentation under controlled conditions, “in the lab” where the archetypal great inventor works amongst his or her test tubes, the contents of which sometimes must blow up on the road to producing the perfect formula.  Yet, outside of the science lab or classroom setting, where not every experiment is expected to succeed, people tend to want to avoid the potential for failure.

We particularly dislike the thought of failing in our personal and family relationships, our financial planning and our careers.  At work, when a project or idea fails to succeed, people instinctively do their best to minimize, explain away, or completely bury it.

And why not?  Nothing succeeds like success, we are told.  At performance review time, employees are keen to showcase projects completed, milestones reached, targets met or better still exceeded.  Nobody wants to have their failures brought into the light and examined.  This is only human.

Smart organizations know, however, that encouraging their employees not to fear failure, and not to avoid talking about their failures, is not only an acceptable thing to do, it is essential to growth and success.  It is not only the Albert Einsteins and Thomas Edisons of the world who require the freedom to make and acknowledge inevitable mistakes on the road to great discoveries.

It takes commitment to overcome a natural human response and to build a workplace culture that not only accepts failures but talks about them openly and in a positive way.  The rewards, however, can be great.  An organization must be able to convince its employees that it is serious about supporting failure in order to encourage creative thinking and experimentation.

Here are some ways in which your organization can nurture a culture that views experimentation and failure as not only acceptable but sometimes necessary.

1. De-stigmatize failure. Make it clear that successful innovation requires occasional failure.

2. Talk openly about failures. Encourage employees to share their stories of failures and what was learned from them.  Work to change the impulse that most employees have to downplay or hide their failures.

3. Actively support projects, ideas and approaches that are not “tried and true”. It is only through experimentation, and failure, that innovation flourishes.  Organizations that are afraid of failure will never throw their support behind anything new, and their employees know this.  Let it be known that uncertain outcomes present no barrier in your organization.

4. Lead by example. Senior people within the organization can help to change the culture by sharing their own stories of failure and growth and by supporting experimentation.

5. Apply common sense. Wholesale application of a failure-friendly philosophy can backfire if an organization’s critical processes are negatively affected.  When the rocket ship is on the launching pad and the countdown has begun it may not be a good time to “try something new”.  There is a time and place for everything and sometimes you really do want the “tried and true”.