Hack:
Learning From Failure - Turning an “Oops!” into an “Aha!!”

By Leonardo Zangrando - Founder and Trainer at LearningStartup

Co-Authored By Edna Pasher, Amanda Boonzaaier, Deb Seidman, Claire McCartney

July 17, 2013 at 2:18pm

failure

learning

experimentation

__experimentation & learning

Moonshots

Redefine the work of leadership

Experiment more often and more cheaply

Increase trust, reduce fear

Summary

LFF extracts value from failure in the form of learning for the organisation. LFF gives employees the chance to compensate their failures by developing a lessons learned that will help the company avoid more failures of the same kind happen in the future.

Mistakes and failure are an inevitable part of organisational life, particularly when trying to do things differently and innovate. Organisations with LFF at the heart of what they do, realise the great potential in learning from mistakes and failures and even publicising these as part of the learning process.

--------------------------

Fear of failure is a tough barrier to overcome. Yet without a culture that celebrates failure to - there will be no innovation. By focusing on what is learned through failure, people build resilience - a key factor in creating organizational adaptability. To experience disappointment/ failure should be a stepping stone towards success. Skills such as tolerance for frustration; trying out new ideas or approaches to tasks; trying out different solutions to problems and even asking for help are valuable qualities (even life skills) gained from struggling through failure.

Problem

Failure destructs value. Failure is considered a stygma in companies and people who failed are diminished, thus destructing even more value.

We should find a way to 1) reduce failure in the long term by encouraging shared discussion of failures,2) avoid diminishing people who failed, 3) leverage failure on the road to success in innovation. Only if you dare to fail - you will eventually succeed!

Lots of organisations in the current difficult economic climate are risk averse and if mistakes or failures happen those involved are either penalised or the issue is swept quickly under the carpet. Mistakes and failures are an inevitable part of trying to do things differently and if a learning culture is not embedded around them the risk is they will be repeated again and again in isolation. Our hack is designed to overcome this challenge, to help companies and people create a learning culture around mistakes and failures and to reinforce the importance of trying new things and innovating. When handled in a proactive and positive manner failure can do wonders to learn about ourselves, our team, our company and even our lives. Our hack sets out to assist companies in finding ways to help people face their failures, celebrate the lessons learnt from it and continuously improve the way things are done.

Solution

The solution is giving people who failed the chance to add value to the company by analyzing what is that they failed and why instead of just forgetting it. The company should then have a way to incorporate the lessons learned in a company wide knowledge repository.

As a team we have several ideas for putting the LFF hack into action. This includes

creating an online collaborative tool which allows people to virtually meet up and talk about failures and things that have gone wrong and share the lessons learnt from this, it also means that a memory bank is retained;
keeping an LFF item as a permanent part of team meetings so it becomes common place to talk about this;
capturing people's imagination around the learning from failures via storytelling at organisational-wide events like conferences and knowledge exchange meetings.

The role HR can play in assisting companies to tolerate failure (even encourage it) is to look at their performance management and the message their performance reviews send out. The whole purpose of performance management is to improve the performance of the individual, the team and the organization as a whole - through identifying areas of non-performance during performance reviews. But isn’t “non-performance” just another word for failure? Could there be a different way to look at what we “do” with these areas of non-performance/ how we react to the non-performance?

Learning from failure can become a regular agenda item at staff meetings. If something has gone wrong (either for an individual or for the team) they discuss what they’ve learned. This gets posted to a knowledge repository for future reference/sharing.

HR can help to prepare the team leaders to encourage frank discussions and not penalize or embarrass the people who present the issues and learning. HR can assist with launching this practice by conducting focus groups and/or facilitating meetings and then communicating how the company (and individuals) benefit from the experience/learning. HR can mine the knowledge base of organizational learning to identify opportunities for broader-based process improvements or to incorporate the learning in training programs.

Those who have contributed to the organization’s learning/improvement should be recognized -- this can be done through internal communications or recognition events.

Practical Impact

People become less willing to hide their mistakes, mistakes become more apparent, the company learns from mistakes and can put in place processes to avoid them the next time.

Much of how it would work in practice is described under section 4. Google has a “continuous improvement” culture. The senior management ask people, in Town Hall meetings, how they can do things better -- that is, they don’t blame people for mistakes, they recognize that mistakes are inevitable -- the focus is on what can be learned from the mistake that would lead to the next breakthrough for business growth. With this sort of positive focus and direction, the company can identify and seize opportunities.

Part of creating this culture could be in hiring people who will thrive in this kind of environment -- for example, asking in the interviews for examples of failures, what people learned, how they handled the set-back. In this way, you are selecting for and putting practices in place that encourage smart risk-taking, continuous learning, and resiliency --- all important aspects of adaptable organizations.

The LFF hack would help to create an important culture change for many organisations. It would help to create a learning culture and a context where it is ok to try new things and get things wrong. Valuable lessons would no longer be swept under the carpet. It would help to reinforce the importance of innovation and new project/ product ideas and would encourage collaboration across organisations. It would also create a climate of trust and courage.

Our hack should provide companies with a practical process/ guide on how to move from a “rewards for success” and “punishment for failure” performance driven environment towards a risk-friendly and failure-tolerant environment. A failure-tolerant environment should be one where employees are encouraged to admit to their mistakes openly and not required to defend/ explain their actions.

The process/ guide should include a variety of steps/ actions companies can use to create this change in their company culture. It is important to include a balanced view on making mistakes in that repeating the same mistake over and over again is not the same thing as making “new” mistakes when trying out new things or trying to overcome challenges. Setting out to make mistakes should not be the objective! Although risk taking is encouraged it should be calculated and done with responsibility.

Challenges

Having LFF become a widespread company practice, avoiding that LFF is used to punish people who failed, having the first people come out and talk about their failures.

In order for LFF to succeed it would have to have senior leadership and organisational-wide support. It would be great if the process was kicked off by some of the senior leadership team sharing some of the failures they have experienced, thereby role-modelling the process for the rest of the organisation. This would reinforce the message that it is ok to make mistakes and the most important aspect is to learn from them.

Trust is an essential element in setting up a new culture which celebrates failure. Once employees start to “owe up” to their mistakes they will be left vulnerable and open to further investigations. It will be critical for senior management to understand the full impact/ consequences of such an approach. They will have to model the desired leadership behaviour and not punish/ blame/ belittle anybody (especially on a company/ public forum) admitting to a failure.

While senior leadership drive and role-modelling would be ideal, I think it is possible to start this with a team or two -- lower in the organization. It does require strong team leadership to succeed. If measurable benefit is seen by others, the practice could grow organically.

Clearly LFF shouldn’t become an alibi for a sloppy culture!

First Steps

Get some high profile volunteers to share their learnings from failures

embed learning from failure as an item on team meetings throughout the organisation

set up a personalised version of yammer where people can start to share LFF online

Create a safe space to explore the value of analysing a failure/ mistake and record the lessons learnt. I would suggest a project “post mortem” process as a starting point. Usually in a project there are more than 1 person (and even more than 1 department/ function) involved. This way there is a group of people with a vested interest and not just 1 or 2 individuals who could be exposed.

Select a project where the outcome was not so great (in other words select a project which failed!). Use the poor results as an opportunity to dissect these results and identify why the deliverables were not achieved. It will be critical to stress that the purpose of this project post-mortem session is not to identify “guilty parties” or allocate blame, but to identify areas where things went wrong and reasons why. Using the 4WH-method (asking What, Why, When, Where and How) could be a non-threatening manner to do this.

Once the project post-mortem is completed, the outcome of the analysis should be communicated more widely to the rest of the organisation - making a big show of the “Lessons Learnt” results. Public acknowledgement should also be given to all parties involved - thanking them for their courage and honesty. It will also be important to communicate what the next step will be - how will the lessons learnt be used/ the next project be made more successful. This way failure is shown not to be a liability but an opportunity to “sharpen the saw” and raise the bar!

Credits

FailForward.org and their MIX hack http://www.mixprize.org/story/fail-forward

Edna Pasher "Failure Quotes" document as edited by the crew

And of course all the crew! Thank you Amanda, Claire, Deb, Edna and Leonardo.

PS I just realized that a couple of years ago my imagination was struck by this TED talk by Kathryn Schulz "On being wrong", that's where all started!

Materials

http://www.mixprize.org/story/fail-forward

http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html

Videos

You need to register in order to submit a comment.

Sort By: Latest Oldest Likes Replies

September 9, 2013 at 9:17am

Stephen Frost

Really like this as goes beyond the obvious 'we should learn from failure' to actually capturing those mistakes and therefore avoiding repetition. To break down the 'we should learn from failure' into more value adding components, I think what we mean is 'we should learn from diverse failures/a range of failures' - in fact we should seek out the broadest range of failures possible because by then capturing those we mitigate/offset/anticipate a greater range of possible future events.

In my team meetings at the Olympics I would always start off with a round table quick fire round of the highlight and low light of the past week from everyone in the room. This became cultural, the new norm, and so it was expected that there would be failures and success to report each week. The only alarm bells would be if the same failures kept coming up again and again.

August 31, 2013 at 12:17pm

Chris Grams

Hi Leonardo and team!

In the hack, I saw the following statement: "Our hack should provide companies with a practical process/ guide on how to move from a “rewards for success” and “punishment for failure” performance driven environment towards a risk-friendly and failure-tolerant environment."

I love this idea--wondering if you could develop this practical tool/guide and include it with the hack? I could see it set up as a set of tasks, e.g. Step 1, Step 2. To make this hack as practical as possible, it would be useful to have this sort of resource that someone reading your hack could pick up if they wanted to figure out how to start helping their organization learn better from its failures.

As I recall, the original idea behind this hack was a prize for learning from failure, which I loved because it was a very specific product that I could see an organization easily figuring out how to implement/try. I'm wondering whether this is still relevant, or if the tool/guide mentioned above could help make this hack even easier to get started with?

September 7, 2013 at 1:40pm

Amanda Boonzaaier

Hallo Chris,
Thanks for the feedback. I am not to sure about designing a specific tool, however I can share a practical example of how we try to acknowledge risk-taking/ "owing up" to failure: we work through our values.

We have 4 core company values of which courage and accountability are 2. Our referral (company slogan) for courage is "I speak up!" - especially when I see something is not right/ when I have not done right. Our HR system also has a social platform where we can allocate "sparks" to colleagues who we see living out these values - recognizing then publicly in the company. At the end of the year we then award 4 excellence awards to our values champion for the year (e.g. using the amount of Sparks allocated and why they were allocated as one of the criteria) We have seen some really great stories and recognition given this way.

July 17, 2013 at 7:52pm

David Rajesh Sundardas

In my experience the reason for failure in many instances is becuase organizations have short term goals. And there are instances where a project is concluded successfully however in the long term proves to have failed on several levels/parameters. How does an organization develop an ability to learn from such failures?
I would argue that prizes should be awarded whenever there is a demonstrated learning from failure instead of having predetermined intervals where such prizes are given away. Perhaps annually top ranking learnings from failures can be further recognised.