The words that managers use to kill innovation: “We can’t afford to fail.”

“We should celebrate failure, that’s how we learn,” someone says. But then the same person would also say “We can’t afford to fail. When we launch the product, it needs to be successful.” This kind of manager (I don’t use the term leader here) confuses people. Celebrating failure and can’t afford to fail are just two different approaches to drive your team. Celebrating failure, means there’s actually no failure, either you are successful or you learn. Can’t afford to fail, means you’re looking at creating history where launching the product for the first time, will give you success. No one has ever done that before. Just google and see the history of successful products you use and you’ve heard about. They went into multiple iterations (which included failures – but of course for them there’s not failure, only lessons learned) before they reached the current successful stage.

Whenever you’re tempted to say “We can’t afford to fail” to your team members, please do this: pause for 2 seconds, look up at the light bulb, take a deep breath and remember what Thomas Alva Edison says “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Then smile.