Are You Squandering Your Intelligent Failures

Rita McGrath

Are You Squandering Your Intelligent Failures?

Thought Sparks

Rita McGrath

Though Sparks

Just back from an amazing week spent with thinkers, do-ers and executives considering culture at Novartis. Amy Edmondson, my dear friend, was there and both of us remain stunned that people are still confused about failure, after we have spent literally decades writing about it. For the record – there are intelligent failures, stupid failures and complex systems failures, all of which have different implications.

University of Glen Falls

Professor Yanis Petros

Welcome to class!

I should mention – we’re not dinosaurs, even though there is one in the background!

Intelligent failures – Here’s what I wrote in Harvard Business Review in – ahem – 2010!

Despite widespread recognition that challenging times place unpredictable demands on people and businesses, I still run across many managers who would prefer to avoid the logical conclusion that stems from this: failure is a lot more common in highly uncertain environments than it is in betterunderstood situations. Instead of learning from failures, many executives seek to keep them hidden or to pretend that they were all part of a master plan and no big deal. To those executives, let me argue that an extraordinarily valuable corporate resource is being wasted if learning from failures is inhibited.

But we’re still hearing about how fear of failure is depriving organizations of valuable learning

And yet, even in organizations that are determined to embrace learning under uncertainty, fear of failure persists.

Perhaps, and I’m hopeful, Amy’s forthcoming new book Right Kind of Wrong will help people in organizations figure this out.

Let’s review it one more time.

In genuinely uncertain conditions, the only way to learn is by trying things out. That means having a hypothesis about what could happen, undergoing an experience that tests that hypothesis and then finding out whether the hypothesis was supported, or not. As I’ve said for a long time, failing (as in trying something out that didn’t work out the way you’d hoped) is the only way to learn in genuinely uncertain environments. It’s what Sim Sitkin called “intelligent failures” and is indeed a class of failure that Amy talks about in her book.

Rita McGrath | Thought Sparks

So, a helpful way of thinking about failure?

Stop the blame game. Design experiments that reflect real life. Stop imposing the expectation of meeting plans on people doing things in unpredictable environments. Recognize that failure maybe needs to be redefined.

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