![]() This concern is based on a false dichotomy. That is why so few organizations have shifted to a culture of psychological safety in which the rewards of learning from failure can be fully realized.Įxecutives I’ve interviewed in organizations as different as hospitals and investment banks admit to being torn: How can they respond constructively to failures without giving rise to an anything-goes attitude? If people aren’t blamed for failures, what will ensure that they try as hard as possible to do their best work? Every child learns at some point that admitting failure means taking the blame. The Blame Gameįailure and fault are virtually inseparable in most households, organizations, and cultures. Leaders can begin by understanding how the blame game gets in the way. That means jettisoning old cultural beliefs and stereotypical notions of success and embracing failure’s lessons. Organizations need new and better ways to go beyond lessons that are superficial (“Procedures weren’t followed”) or self-serving (“The market just wasn’t ready for our great new product”). The attitudes and activities required to effectively detect and analyze failures are in short supply in most companies, and the need for context-specific learning strategies is underappreciated. Second, learning from organizational failures is anything but straightforward. In organizational life it is sometimes bad, sometimes inevitable, and sometimes even good. They also believe that learning from it is pretty straightforward: Ask people to reflect on what they did wrong and exhort them to avoid similar mistakes in the future-or, better yet, assign a team to review and write a report on what happened and then distribute it throughout the organization. Most executives I’ve talked to believe that failure is bad (of course!). They should instead recognize that failure is inevitable in today’s complex work organizations. Executives commonly and understandably worry that taking a sympathetic stance toward failure will create an “anything goes” work environment. Strong leadership can build a learning culture-one in which failures large and small are consistently reported and deeply analyzed, and opportunities to experiment are proactively sought. But first leaders must understand how the blame game gets in the way and work to create an organizational culture in which employees feel safe admitting or reporting on failure.įailures fall into three categories: preventable ones in predictable operations, which usually involve deviations from spec unavoidable ones in complex systems, which may arise from unique combinations of needs, people, and problems and intelligent ones at the frontier, where “good” failures occur quickly and on a small scale, providing the most valuable information. And successful learning from failure is not simple: It requires context-specific strategies. In organizational life, she says, some failures are inevitable and some are even good. ![]() The author, a professor at Harvard Business School, thinks both beliefs are misguided. Many executives believe that all failure is bad (although it usually provides lessons) and that learning from it is pretty straightforward.
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