Handling failures productively

Failure is often the object of contradictory injunctions. We encourage the right to make mistakes, underlining that this represents a key stage in innovation. But in practice, failure is rarely valorized. On the contrary, failures tend to be stigmatized and are generally perceived as a hindrance to career progression. This ambivalence is detrimental to initiative-taking and the capacity for innovation, as few employees want to be associated with failure. As Jeremy Utley, Director of Executive Education at Stanford University’s d.school puts it: “If people are afraid of failure or think that failure is a career-limiting move, then you’re in trouble. If you want to reward innovation, you have to be prepared to reward failure.”

Given that, how can we create a healthier approach to failure? The challenge is to resolve a dilemma: encouraging judicious risk-taking, essential to innovation, while keeping to a minimum failures with no added value, which have no effect other than to undermine performance.

To this end, Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, invites us to distinguish three types of failure. A first category concerns those caused by well-identified errors, which require taking simple measures in order to avoid them. Next come complex failures, also undesirable, but resulting from a conjunction of factors and interdependencies that make them much more difficult to anticipate and control. To prevent them, we need to conduct an in-depth analysis of drift risks. Finally, there exist failures that can be qualified as “intelligent”, insofar as they result from deliberate experimentation, aimed at learning how best to progress in an unfamiliar environment. The challenge here is to lead teams to value these failures by viewing them as learning successes, so that everyone is ready to invest themselves fully in innovation initiatives.

Affirming a clear distinction between failures to be proscribed and productive failures—while specifying ways of reacting to them—is invaluable in removing the ambiguity surrounding a “right to make mistakes” that is often greeted with skepticism by our teams.

In this synopsis:
– Overcoming our psychological biases in the face of failure
– Distinguishing three types of failure to better manage them
– Helping our team to bounce back from a failure