Failure is an option: Why learning from failure is the key to unlocking innovation in government
This article was co-authored by Andi Mirviss and Josh Sorin (@Josh_Sorin).
Innovation is a buzz-word so pervasive in city government, it’s hard to know what people mean when they say it. While it’s most common to associate “innovation” with flashy technology, we view innovation as a process that creates new value by addressing problems.
Innovative solutions can be as revolutionary as autonomous vehicles or as simple as a revised survey question that enables governments to better understand resident perspectives. Indeed, we believe that innovation is a skill that can be taught, nurtured and developed — leading to increased innovation maturity over time. This maturity can range from cultures that promote ‘sweeping problems under the rug,’ to those that routinely engage in complex experiments to confront problems head-on.
Regardless of what you believe “innovation” means, there is a universal belief that innovation leads to better outcomes for people. Moreover, it’s expected that as government teams mature along the spectrum of innovation (or ‘get better at innovating,’) the outcomes they achieve for residents will increase exponentially. Unfortunately, as any city practitioner will tell you, the reality can look quite different.
From innovation suggestion boxes that receive no suggestions, to the implementation of ‘smart city’ technologies that spark community backlash, we know the road to impact is littered with the remains of ‘big’ and ‘small’ innovations that fail to achieve better outcomes for residents. It seems that teams with even the most robust government innovation operations often do not achieve the improvement in resident outcomes they hope for.
Investigating the impact gap
So, why the mismatch between expectations and reality? It’s not that innovation itself is a fruitless pursuit. Indeed, many city government innovations have resulted in substantive, successful improvements in resident outcomes in the U.S. Built for Zero, for example, has effectively ended chronic homelessness in 3 cities.
While budgets and processes pose formidable barriers to impact, our hypothesis is that the primary reason for this mismatch rests in how government culture navigates failure. Innovation begins when an individual or team notices that things are not going according to plan (i.e., failures). It develops substance when teams spend time understanding the problems that resulted in the failure. And innovation creates new value when something is done to solve these problems. In essence, innovation is the ‘process’ of identifying, understanding, and addressing a failure.
But government cultures do not typically facilitate this process for three reasons. The first reason is just human nature. It’s hard in any context to speak up when things are not going right. But it’s particularly hard in government where decades of entrenched risk aversion have resulted in structures that reward leaders and frontline workers for preserving the status quo, even if the status quo consistently produces poor results.
The second, interconnected reason has to do with the broader power dynamics in government agencies. Managerial structures within government have long placed decision- and policy-making power to those who are removed from the ground. Those who work on the frontlines — and thus see systems and policy failures most closely — are not empowered with the decision-making responsibility that allows them to use their knowledge effectively by fully engaging in the process of identifying, analyzing, and doing something about failure.
And finally, the third reason is that, in government, innovation is typically viewed as a ‘solution’ (often technology-based) rather than a ‘process’. This approach defines “success” as the implementation of a pre-determined solution, privileging certainty over curiosity, and rewarding the implementation of ‘what works’ elsewhere regardless of whether it works here.
As a result, government practitioners operate in an environment where they have neither the culture that allows them to acknowledge and learn from failures nor the space to develop solutions that can thrive in their local context.
Failure is an option
And yet, “fail early, fail fast, fail often” is standard ethos in the most innovative private sector companies. Thomas Edison’s 1,000 failures, resulting in the lightbulb, pervade American mythology. 3M, home of the all-important Post-It, famously saves 20% of its annual operating budget for ‘failed ideas’ that never go to market. TedTalks on the value of risk-taking abound, telling anyone who will listen that there is no clearer path to success than by becoming more comfortable with — nay, excited by — failure. This is because the private sector has long understood that learning from failure is the critical link between innovation and impact.
But in government, learning from failure isn’t quite as easy. Despite regular calls to the contrary, governments can’t be run like businesses because business and government serve entirely different purposes. The mission of government is to ensure the basic safety and welfare of residents, not to increase profit. It’s therefore not feasible that 20% of government work can fail to reach its goals, because people rely on government for their basic well-being. The private-sector’s ‘safe’ failures feel even less relatable to government departments with tight budgets — which, to be clear, are most of them.
Importantly, governments have long paid the price for ‘larger’ failures in ways that the private sector has not. Consent decrees can restrict any kind of internal innovation, extreme media scrutiny can make it seem that any misstep will result in scandal, and (rightfully) high expectations from residents provide little bandwidth for experiments that do not quickly result in successful solutions. Collectively, these circumstances have rendered it such that it feels like failure is not an option in government. It’s no wonder why city governments struggle to create and sustain cultures that allow them to learn from failure (i.e. failing forward.)
Ultimately, it’s appropriate that government be more risk-averse than the private sector. Failing forward must look different in government than it does in the private sector — but it’s essential for tackling the pressing issues of our time.
Our research to understand how governments can fail forward
So, how can city government capture some of that private sector magic and learn to embrace failure?
There are some promising principles, driven from research on workplace cultures, that we think can be bolstered in city government. Scholars such as Amy Edmonson have written authoritatively about the benefits of psychologically safe environments that encourage the necessity of learning from failure. Her arguments about the need for leadership to set the tone that learning from failure is a virtue in the workplace (either via instilling changes in systems and processes, or by speaking of their own failures) are particularly promising.
But, the truth is, we don’t know. That’s why we’re embarking on this research project.
Over the coming months, CPI will seek to better understand the barriers city governments face when trying to build cultures of innovation that embrace the necessity of ‘failing forward’. The devil of this work will be in uncovering the details of city government experiences. We hope that by working directly with cities we will better understand their unique challenges to innovating with impact.
We will do this via a series of workshops (“failure foundries”) where participating city departments will identify barriers to learning from failures in their own organizations, generate ideas, and develop action plans to turn those ideas into action. So far, we’ve conducted failure foundries with three city departments that have already been instrumental in shaping our thinking. In Spring 2020, we will bring participating cities together for a FailureCon where we will learn from each other and experts about how to create the systems, structures, and culture that allows government to fail forward.
If your city department is interested in developing your innovation maturity, but has been frustrated and discouraged by the well-entrenched, risk-averse nature of government, we invite you to join us on this journey.
We are actively seeking city departments to participate in Failure Foundries — you can express interest for consideration by filling out this brief form.
