Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Teams Use Failure to Succeed - Amy Edmondson

Introduction:

“Intelligent failures provide valuable new knowledge. They bring discovery. They occur when experimentation is necessary simply because answers are not knowable in advance.

Note that healthy attributions about failure not only stay balanced and rational, they also take account of the ways—small or large—that you may have contributed to what happened. Maybe you didn’t prepare sufficiently for the interview. This is not to beat yourself up or wallow in shame. Quite the contrary; it’s about developing the self-awareness and confidence to keep learning, making whatever changes you need so as to do better next time. Each of us is a fallible human being, living and working with other fallible human beings. Even if we work to overcome our emotional aversion to failure, failing effectively isn’t automatic. We also need help to reduce the confusion created by the glib talk about failure that is especially rampant in conversations on entrepreneurship.

Implications of Context for Failure:

Context

Consistent

Variable

Novel

Example

Vehicle assembly line

Surgical operating room

Scientific laboratory

The state of knowledge

Well-developed

Well-developed knowledge, vulnerable to unexpected events

Limited

Uncertainty

Low

Medium

High

Most common failure type

Basic failure

Complex failure

Intelligent failure

For example, meeting with senior executives in a large financial services firm in April

2020, I listened as they explained that the current business environment made failure temporarily “off-limits.” Understandably concerned about an economic climate increasingly challenged by a global pandemic, these business leaders wanted everything to go as well as possible. Generally speaking, they were sincere in their desire to learn from failure. But enthusiasm about failing was acceptable when times were good, they told me; now that the future looked uncertain, pursuing unerring success was more imperative than ever. These smart, well-intentioned people needed to rethink failure. First, they needed to appreciate the context. The need for fast learning from failure is most critical in times of uncertainty and upheaval, in part because failures are more likely! Second, while encouraging people to minimize basic and complex failures may help them focus, welcoming intelligent failures remains essential to progress in any industry. Third, they needed to recognize that the most likely outcome of their prohibition on failure wasn’t perfection but rather not hearing about the failures that do occur. When people don’t speak up about small failures—say, an accounting error—these can spiral into larger failures, such as massive banking losses.

By not doing the work to discover the vulnerabilities that needed to be fixed before a full-scale launch, the pilot failed the company and its customers. The solution is to create incentives that motivate pilots not to succeed but rather to fail well. An effective pilot is littered with the right kind of wrong-numerous intelligent failures, each generating valuable information. To design a smart pilot in your organization, you should be able to answer yes to the following questions:

1. Is the pilot being tested under typical (or better yet, challenging) circumstances (rather than optimal ones)?

1. Is the goal of the pilot to learn as much as possible (not to prove the success of the innovation to senior executives)?

1. Is it clear that compensation and performance reviews are not based on a successful outcome for the pilot?

1. Were explicit changes made as a result of the pilot?