I recently published my first blog post for Harvard Business Review – To Increase Innovation, Take the Sting Out of Failure.
It was nice to see it resonated with readers. One of the clear themes I noticed in the comments was – I’m a believer! But I’m not the problem. The rest of my organization is. How do I get the rest of my organization to support smart failures?
It’s a great question. The idea of supporting failure gets a lot of lip service in organizations, but that doesn’t mean it actually happens. It’s still scary.
While there are a lot of fancy organizational structure, process, or system strategies I could give to answer the question, the most powerful answer is to merely start with you. If you believe in innovation, and you believe in supporting smart failures, and you specify behaviors you want to exhibit and see in those around you, you WILL start to see change. You’ll also develop more courage to push others in the organization. It might not be as fast as you want. And people will still push back. But it’s the only way change happens.
–Doug
If one wants to learn about innovation start with the recently departed CEO of Apple Steve Jobs. Mr., Jobs may not have been the nicest person, but what Mr. Jobs did was to “Celebrate Innovative Failure” To be innovative I agree that you have to be able to let your people know that you need to be able to have successful failure. If you organization says innovate, but you must hit these 10 goals or else! Then innovation will not happen. The other issue I bring up that was omitted is a Change Management issue, or a shifting of a paradigm. To be innovative requires Change Management; it actually needs you the organizational leaders and employees to view things from a different dimension or portal. Most people and most organizations see themselves in one or two dimensions. They say things like.. This who we are…. and this is what we do! But as Mr. Shaw the noted and great poet once wrote“Some people see things as they are and ask WHY, while others dream things as they are not, and say WHY NOT. We need to change the organizational perspective, through change and training to adapt towards this culture. A culture that can exist in spite of failure and in spite of the easy road. That’s what I do for a living, so I know that it can be done!