Learning from Failure

On March 3, 2024, 3:00 AM

In most cultures, failure is frowned upon. We often blame others for what goes wrong, rather than reflect on the reasons for falling short and what we can take from the experience moving forward.

Our fear of failure can be challenging in many parts of our lives. In a big organisation, it can be disastrous.

Fear of being seen as failure stifles innovation, leads to issues being brushed under the carpet when they could have been addressed in their infancy, and deters people from sharing their ideas. It can all be summed up in the well-known maxim, “Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM”; make the safe and secure choice and your job will be protected.

Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership at Harvard Business School and author of seven books, including Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well, has been studying failure for more than thirty years and occasionally gets frustrated at how badly many large organisations respond to failure.

Edmondson explained, “Organisations need to keep learning in a world that keeps stubbornly changing, and yet that turns out to be a rather unnatural act. It’s hard for organisations, especially big ones with their processes and routines, to easily adapt and shift to be more successful in the world as it changes. And failure plays a central role in learning.

“Yet, most organisations have a culture that is more conducive to bragging about our successes than talking openly about our failures.

“I’m interested in failure because I’m interested in learning. I’m interested in learning because I’m interested in effectiveness in a changing world.”

Intelligent Failure

Edmondson challenges the perceived wisdom that all failure is, by its very nature, bad for us. She talks about “intelligent failure”, an outcome that results from experimentation. “An intelligent failure is an undesired outcome; it’s not the outcome we had hoped for, maybe even expected, but it takes place in new territory where we lacked available knowledge about how to get that result that we wanted.

“An intelligent failure happens in pursuit of a goal. We’re not just messing around with resources; it’s thoughtful. We’ve done our homework.

“These are the kinds of failures that we really must train ourselves to welcome because they are the source of discovery.”

In The Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson talks about how failures in early attempts at open-heart surgery laid the pathway for the successes we have witnessed in this field ever since. She explains how we take for granted that “surgeons today can crack open the breastbone and operate on the heart of a living person and repair it and give you more years of life.

“And yet there was a point in history where no one had ever done that before. It was initially considered more or less impossible because you couldn’t operate on a beating heart.”

To get from that point to the daily miracles we witness in the current era, doctors had to fail and patients died. But the key, according to Edmondson, is that they never operated on a patient who had a better option. “If the choice was between operating and possibly making them better or not operating and they would still be OK, they wouldn’t operate.”

Intelligent failure is all about the failure being “no bigger than it has to be to get the new knowledge that it brings.” By only operating on patients who had no other alternatives and would have died without an attempt to save them, the risk of failure was mitigated.

Culture Blocks

The challenge is that too few modern organisations operate within a culture that encourages intelligent failure. Short-term pressures can often make failure something to hide under a rock rather than shine a spotlight on to learn from and progress.

Edmondson argues that organisations need to think beyond short-term reporting and, if necessary, take a hit. After all, if everyone just focused on quarterly profits, nobody would ever take a risk or try something new at all. “I don’t think you have to be a visionary, but you have to be reasonably thoughtful. And you do need to get people on board with that.

It’s important to recognise longer-term thinking as a cost of being in business five years from now and making that a cost you are willing to pay.”

Perfectionism also, somewhat naturally, creates a barrier to learning from failure. Edmondson argues that “perfection equals disconnection”, explaining that leaders who strive for perfection may impose the same unrealistic standards on their team members, creating a culture of fear. “There’s no such thing as perfect”, Dr. Edmondson explains, “and so they end up blaming and shaming if they make a mistake.”

Rather than striving for perfection and creating a climate of fear, Edmondson wants to see leaders who are focused on developing trusted relationships across their team and encouraging honest and vulnerable conversations that lead to growth and innovation.

“High-quality relationships, are ones where we’re willing to tell each other the truth and we can roll up our sleeves and get hard things done because we have that honesty, because we’re not posturing and we’re not putting on a show for each other. We’re authentically digging into the challenges on our mutual plates.

“That’s how I think of high-quality relationships, not people who I know really well, but ones where I believe I can be truthful.”

The writer is Andy Lopata, a specialist in professional relationships and networking for over 20 years.

Story By Psychology Today