For several years now, the mantra of innovation-hungry tech start-ups has been “fail fast, fail often, fail early”. Implicit in this philosophy is the assumption that the company will learn from its mistakes and plough back the lessons it learns into the next iteration of its product or service. Innumerable management gurus and coaches tell us to shun the fear of failure and instead embrace a tolerance to risk. Paddy Upton, a coach to professional cricketers and athletes, says in his book, The Barefoot Coach, that “personal mastery is about pursuing success rather than trying to avoid failure. It is an acceptance that failure paves the path towards learning and success.”
Indeed, we learn more from our mistakes and failures than we ever can from our successes. It is also true that failure goes hand-in-hand with innovation. If you don’t ever miss, it is likely you are not aiming high enough. Words such as “Failure is an option here” (Elon Musk) and “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” (Edison may have said this after failing for several months to make a decent light bulb filament) suggest that failure is not just something we will have to learn to deal with but is perhaps even essential to innovation.
While these sayings are memorable, your team members will avoid taking risks and stick to the tried and tested, if you, as their leader, react negatively to their mistakes. Our team’s behaviour is affected much more by what we do than by what we say or by the glossy posters we put up in the office. Bringing about this shift in your team’s mindsets won’t be easy – it runs dead against the conventional, and indeed human, desire to look good and avoid stumbling. Starting small, acknowledging your own fumbles in front of your team, avoiding the ‘blame game’ when something goes wrong, accepting responsibility by asking, “what could I have done differently?”, focusing on what we can learn from the experience and staying positive will go a long way to creating a culture of experimenting and learning.
Very true. Especially in the case of organizations that have attained success through the quality and compliance route, it’s indeed difficult to change the very DNA where mistakes are welcomed as a part of learning.
Well written Ravi. Fear of failure is significantly corelated to low self esteem
Excellent views Ravi… Great thoughts.
Leaders as role models are critical for the culture to change for the better… unfortunately what we see as the trend now (for whatever rationale they may have), is that the leaders are looking for results, which implies no failures, as against appreciating the approach (efforts). Your thoughts?
Kumanan, one of my clients defines performance as both the what (hard numbers) and the how (behaviours & practices). In an economic straitjacket, most leaders will define performance more narrowly and the team will become risk-averse. This is unfortunate because a culture of trying new things (with its attendant failures) can help differentiate ourselves and is essentially playing the long game.
I agree. Leaders need to encourage teams to take risk. But at the same time, they also need to teach the teams to evaluate risk and its consequences. Will it affect the customer, brand etc.