Break It Until You Make It

Why is failure such a negative in the corporate environment?

I touched on it in my recent article about design thinking and it’s worth additional discussion. It seems crazy to me how that attitude prevails throughout entire businesses when experimentation and inevitable failure is the key to innovation. Remember that science itself is built on experiment after experiment and failure after failure. Failure is actually awesome and should be encouraged. It’s how we learn to do things in better ways.

Technology startups, as SAP used to be, are built by identifying a broken process, building new technology to fix it, and failing a bunch of times (bloody quickly) until you have a product people are willing to pay for. Dear me, it’s hard to imagine anything that breaks more often than technology.

Breaking the bad

My regular readers know that I bang on about new leadership all the time. I do so because it’s becoming ever more important to question our attitudes and the way we do things.

Sales of our HXM software are such that I can see business leaders are beginning to understand how important their people’s experience is. But technology alone is not enough to drive the productivity growth they’re hoping to achieve. In my recent piece What is Cloud Attitude, I wrote that in order to benefit from game-changing tech like HXM, it must be complemented by new policies, processes and programs for people. Frustratingly, some customers purchase the technology, but don’t adjust their policy mindsets.

Even where the newer leadership concepts of sufficiently resourcing employees and removing roadblocks have filtered through, the next crucial step is not carried out. That of challenging people to break processes that aren’t working for customers and encouraging them to fail as a pathway to innovation.

Being a catalyst for change

I’m a sponsor for a 3-month leadership acceleration program here at SAP called Catalyst. It remotely joins some of our most talented employees from any of our business units around the world and who are known for doing things differently. We give them a few thorny customer problems to choose from and encourage them to pull a process apart in order to improve it. They receive ongoing advice and support from me, plus a budget to build any (reasonably priced) solution.

I ask them to break things. I ask them to fail. And I say I want them to fail in order to learn and achieve much more, much faster.

The most recent Catalyst group impressed me immensely by using customer data to identify basic processes that were a blockage for customers and a real-time sieve for our specialist support team. They solved the problem by building an AI chatbot within the software to recognise what a user was trying to do and prompt them with the solution. In one fell swoop they created a vastly improved experience for tens of thousands of users and for technical support by eliminating the number one support ticket category.

Clipping the (support) ticket

The solution was brilliant in its simplicity. And of course they were too young to understand any of my Microsoft Clippy references…

Clippy is an oldie, but a goodie example of a company building a product and hoping customers would wrap themselves around it. Whereas I think the Catalyst group demonstrates the way forward for product development is to wrap ourselves around the customer to find what isn’t working for them, asking why the process works that way, then challenging it.

As leaders, we need to stimulate our people to disturb the status quo and embrace that failure is essential to innovation in customer experience. And what large company doesn’t have customer data by the truckload as a catalyst for breaking things?