“I can't tell you how many business leaders I meet, how many organizations I visit, that espouse the virtues of innovation and creativity. Yet so many of these same leaders and organizations live in fear of mistakes, missteps, and disappointments — which is why they have so little innovation and creativity. If you’re not prepared to fail, you’re not prepared to learn.”
—Bill Taylor, “How Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Amazon Learn From Failure”
This quote from Taylor highlights one of the key tensions leaders must reconcile: experimentation and risk of failure vs. safety and risk of stagnation. But Taylor conclusively answers that leaders should lean into experimentation, in his excellent article, “How Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Amazon Learn From Failure.” Experimentation has its own rewards, and Taylor argues that failure is one of life’s best teachers— despite all of our natural inclinations to avoid the unknown and risky. Taylor also shows that the cost of avoiding all mistakes is high: teams shut down, they stop experimenting, and innovation dies if employees expect failure to end in job loss, shame, or demotions.
Instead, he urges leaders to lean into experimentation for themselves and their teams in order to allow for growth, learning, and creativity. This stance means both encouraging experimentation and creating an environment in which failure is not failure. Even when an experiment ends badly, you and your team can learn important lessons. In other words, fail thoughtfully. Taylor frames this need to fail thoughtfully in the context of today’s competitive climate in another article, “Are You Learning as Fast as the World Is Changing?”
Today, the challenge for leaders at every level is no longer just to out-hustle, out-muscle, and out-maneuver the competition. It is to out-think the competition in ways big and small, to develop a unique point of view about the future, and help your organization get there before anyone else does.
For Taylor, failure is not only an opportunity for learning and growth, it’s necessary as a mechanism to spur the innovation that enables organizations to perform at their best and be successful. In this framework, good leaders manage learning from failures they same way they manage any other aspect of a team's output.
Stay in close, regular contact: Your team needs to know that you want them to come to you with hiccups and challenges, in the middle of those challenges. You can’t disappear when things start to go badly, only to pop up later with recrimination and “Why didn’t you?”
Reinforce frequently the team’s vision and expectations: Remind the team that you and the organization are committed to leaning into experimentation and recognize that sometimes experiments go wrong. [reinforce message as leader, in light of challenge; reassurance that this won’t end in punishment, commitment to experimentation even when it doesn’t go well]
Step in with guidance and suggestions to limit the scope of a mistake: Even in the midst of things going wrong, you can support the team to limit the impact of a failure. The section below discusses how to manage failure on a big scale, and the same principles apply at a smaller scale.
Unaffordable Failure
Some challenges, however, are so significant, unexpected, and/or potentially catastrophic that a leader cannot afford to let the failure run its natural course. In these instances, leaders must step in and actively manage. Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik, authors of “How to Prepare for a Crisis You Couldn’t Possibly Predict,” acknowledge that “sooner or later, every team faces an unexpected crisis,” but they also suggest it’s possible for teams to learn how “to stay calm, diagnose a problem, and come up with solutions,” even if the team is not naturally good at “handling the unexpected.” From their studies of many major failures, Clearfield and Tilcsik have identified three lessons.
“Stop”: If things start to go south, be willing to stop whatever is in motion, and empower your team members to do the same without fear of repercussions. One way to give your team the confidence to halt a project is to praise them when they do, focusing on the harm prevented. (The article has some great examples.)
"“Do, monitor, diagnose”: Sometimes stopping isn't an option. In these instances, work through a cycle of doing the task and then monitoring what happens. (Usually, the present crisis is because one of the initial actions didn’t have the effect or result it was supposed to.) Dd the action have the expected outcome? Monitoring enables the team to determine where/how the failure is happening and to apply solutions by diagnosing potential causes.
“Know something about everybody else’s job”: Build redundancy into your team. Communicating problems and brainstorming is easier when the team has experience across functions. They know how each others’ roles fits with theirs and, in a pinch, can step in for each other
Converting Failure into Experimentation
But what do we do if failure smacks us in the face? When the mistake is big and personal, when embarrassment and career repercussions seem imminent? Susan Peppercorn's article, “How to Overcome Your Fear of Failure,” offers four steps to move through failure:
Redefine failure: “Behind many fears is worry about doing something wrong, looking foolish, or not meeting expectations — in other words, fear of failure. By framing a situation you're dreading differently before you attempt it, you may be able to avoid some stress and anxiety.”
Set Approach Goals: Approach goals are positive: they focus on what an individual wants to happen. In contrast, avoidance goals are negative: they focus on what an individual wants not to happen. (For example, “I want to have a constructive feedback conversation with my employee” vs. “I don’t want to have conflict with my employee about the feedback I need to give them.”) Rather than “unconsciously set[ting] goals around what you don't want to happen,” reframe goals in terms of what you do want coming out of the experience. (Alex’s story in the article is a great example.)
Create a fear list: Itemizing all the worst case scenarios has two benefits. First, it can make your fears more concrete— and less terrifying because you can see them. Second, the list gives you an opportunity to prepare for those potential outcomes, so you’re ready if they arise.
Focus on learning: Circling back to our starting point, all significant progress requires some failure, and it’s important to recognize that any risk comes with a real risk of not working out. But “if you understand that reality going in, you can be prepared to wring the most value out of the experience, no matter the outcome.”
What all these authors’ suggestions have in common is that they propose a systematic response to challenges. Start by understanding the scope of the issue, and from there decide who should be involved in understanding the challenge. Ask yourself who has the skills or the experience? Who can learn from the situation? Download with the group to capture learnings and reinforce that we all must make mistakes now and then to grow and learn.