Getting More Comfortable With Failure

Yesterday I did a slot with Ian Wright on Innovation and Failure as part of Digital Leaders Week , so I’m recapping some thoughts for future reference.

Whilst our organisations publicly evangelise innovation they are less tolerant of a necessary part of the innovation process — failure.

Failure is a necessary part of the innovation process because from failure comes as part of learning, iteration, adaptation.

Instead our organisations have become very successful at defending themselves against failure through the construction of multiple layers of defence. These include policies and procedures, risk assessments, work rules, and team training all designed to tell us that failure is bad.

When we were in the early days of Bromford Lab we explored what it was that separated innovative organisations from the also-rans. The four characteristics we identified were as follows:

It was the fourth point that embracing failure does not mean having a lax approach or work environment, and that failure can co-exist with high performance standards, that led us to frame the initial offer as this:

Learning from failure is the measure to obsess about

Nielsen research suggests that “about two out of every three products are destined to fail.” However this is rarely acknowledged and hardly ever promoted.

In the public sector , where projects take years rather than weeks, and pilots become mainstream services without any evaluation — things are worse.

Nothing fails. Everything is a success.

Failure is only bad if we are doomed to repeat it. Breaking our organisations out of cyclical failure should be our number one priority.