Return on Failure
Legendary basketballer Michael Jordan is famous for many on court successes during his career with the Chicago Bulls in the 1980s and 90s. He is also famous for saying “I have failed over and over again in my career and that is why I succeed”.
This is a wonderful admission by such a high profile person in a world where failure is so often feared and frowned upon especially in a business context. Perhaps we should take the lead from the likes of Michael Jordan and look at getting a return on failure in the same way that we look to get a ‘return on investment’.
Here are some practical tips for making this happen in your organisation.
- Set the right scene to make people comfortable. The natural tendency of people is to shield themselves because they fear the consequences of being associated with failure. They fear missing out on a promotion, getting fired or even just the tarnished reputation. Therefore organisations need to reassure people that they should not worry about these consequences but rather praise them for their willingness to participate and make contributions to the learning and improvement process.
- Learn from every failure by asking lots of open ended questions to uncover the cause/s of failure. This may need to be wide ranging across multiple facets of a business such as customer services to operations. A technique called the ‘Five Whys’ will prove helpful to uncover the real root cause/s as will the use of cross functional teams that can introduce new perspective and insights. Leading organisations use a method called ‘visualisation’ to facilitate this process.
- Share the lessons by bringing people together regularly to talk about failures and what they and their teams have learned and actions taken as a result.
- Undertake self-assessment to make sure that the ‘learning from failure’ process adopted in the organisation is working effectively.
With all this in mind it is probably fair to say that what organisations should really be fearful of is not the failure itself, but rather the main fear should be not getting a return on failure!
Reference: “Increase Your Return on Failure”, Julian Birkinshaw and Martine Haas, Harvard Business Review, May 2016.