Thought Experiment #34: Every organisation needs a Director of Failure

If you are thinking the title is clickbait, or why anyone would want to be associated with failure in their job title, then you are already the wrong person for this role. For those still reading, in the next 5 minutes, I will outline why every organisation needs a Director of Failure (DoF), to help turn failure into a strategic capability.

Fail-fast, the silicon valley mantra, has become glamorised and romanticised. There is even a worldwide movement – ‘F***up Nights’ – designed to help those involved in young firms and start-ups learn from each other’s mistakes. However, fail-fast is just a one-dimensional view of failure. There are at least five other dimensions: fail-forward, fail-small, fail-prevent, fail-plus and fail-stop.

In the dictionary, failure is synonymous with ‘unsuccessful’. In reality, it’s not a definitive state, but rather best viewed as a spectrum. And, it is not sensationalist to say that 100% of the projects inside any organisation are somewhere on a failure spectrum. Visualising failure on a spectrum, you will see that every organisation has many great ideas which are never kick-started due to a fear of failure, or projects that are failing, which cannot be stopped earlier due to politics and reputational risks, and crucially everything in between.

Portfolio of work: Let's break down this role into five areas of focus.

Stop failure – 10% of the time. Fail-stop.

The Director of Failure’s job is not to enforce or force the hard stoppage of failing projects. But rather, as a partner, is to spend 10% of his/her time helping senior executives to objectively evaluate projects and navigate the journey to killing off what simply does not work.

Most middle managers are not blind to projects under their remit which are failing, but reputational risk of acknowledging failure, the emotional detachment that it demands, addressing of the human repercussions on fellow colleagues, the need for the same if not higher budgets for next year, or a combination of the above, ensures that killing off projects is a monumentally difficult task. Senior executives often don’t have time to focus on the old, with a relentless pressure for the new. Thus, the Director of Failure becomes a way for senior management to help them get their jobs done.

The Director of Failure’s job is to offer an easier path to comfortable failure. This path, for senior leaders to project managers, should be easier than maintaining the status quo, and a path that doesn’t rely on waiting for other shifts, such as new strategies or job position changes.

Not all decisions to stop projects can be mandated from the top. Thus, the Director of Failure needs to be an autonomous role, whose job is to seek out failing projects at the organisation, department and individual level and help them to navigate the journey.

The Amazons of this world do not have a better intuition of what will succeed or fail in the market (look at the Fire phone) than the rest of us. Rather, they have the culture, mindsets, processes and incentives that ensure they kill off fast what doesn’t work – to make room (physical, mental, budgetary) for what could work.

Sample metric: The value (in $) of projects that are stopped and the necessary savings that result from the projects having kept going another 12 months.

Recycle Failure – 10% of the time. Fail-plus.

This concept is inspired by Mo Gawdat from ex Google X. For all their failed projects, and they have more than their fair share, they have a ‘graveyard’. The concept being that for every failed project, there is some success (learning) that can be leveraged for other use-cases. The job of Director of Failure is to leverage past failures for future success.

Not all ‘failure’ is binary. Many times failure hides pockets of success. Success can be identified in terms of the code that can be reused, the talents of people that have been unearthed for other more relevant projects, new partnerships formed, etc.

Yet, in most organisations, failure (aka learning) is not codified. People move on and new people make the same mistakes.

Some failure is not a failure of the project or the idea or the value generated, but failure to align with strategy. For example, one medical start-up had the ingenious idea to go to big pharmaceutical clients and ask to build on top of their sub-$100m market drugs. The big pharma companies are designed to exploit the billion dollar drugs pipeline and smaller drugs are not worth the strategic investment relative to their other priorities. Yet, this failure to align and leverage smaller drugs can be exploited by others outside to build on top and access untapped revenue.

Sample metric: The value (in $) of 'failure' that others build on top of + an annual failure report that is read by half of the organisation.

Course correcting failure – 60% of the time. Fail-forward.

Now, this should be the single most significant part of the Director of Failure’s role.

Having supported quite a few start-up founders to pivot, with some going from failing with zero customers, users and investment to raising multi-million dollar funding rounds, I’ve come to realise that this is a significant untapped potential inside organisations. PayPal, Instagram, Sony, Slack and many more successful stories all pivoted at one point. Whilst it is possible inside start-ups, the job of Director of Failure is to make pivots (course-correction) possible inside established organisations.

Clayton Christensen "93% of all innovations that have ultimately become successful, started off in the wrong direction"

The Director of Failure’s job is to co-create with project managers. By designing and running a range of interventions from one hour to 30 days, the Director of Failure helps project managers to recognise failure, admit failure, and crucially course-correct by forming new hypotheses, helping them test, approving new budgets that allow them to unearth potential new insights and, most importantly, giving permission to project managers to pivot.

Metric: The value of X (in $) million in course-corrected projects accrued over the next 2 years.

Prevent (big) failure: 10% of the time. Fail-minus.

The Director of Failure is not an oracle, and doesn’t know the path to success for each and every project.

This person does, however, have the benefit of pattern recognition. A seasoned, been-there-done it, failed-and-iterated-to-success professional, this person can recognise future failures based on past ones.

The Director of Failure is able to recognise that many projects fail because some significant part of good practice (aka process) was missed.

Before a project gets off the ground, the DoF uses proxy measures to help employees to detect failure-points. For example, if the project doesn’t have the right diversity of expertise, the project has become too complex in terms of stakeholders too quickly, the riskiest assumptions haven’t been tested, there is a limited budget for just one iteration, there is lack of alignment with strategy, the problem is not well defined or they have even chosen the wrong problem to solve, crucial steps are mixed – these are all early signs towards failure.

This sort of monitoring goes beyond the simple red, amber and green statuses of projects – to providing integrated pathways for individuals to self-diagnose failure.

Sample metric: Number of early intervention points that have been adopted across the organisation.

Encourage Failure – 10% of the time. Fail-Small.

The antithesis of stopping failure is encouraging more failure, along a different dimension of size.

There are many ideas that simply don’t get started, because there is a failure inertia. The Director of Failure’s job is to help individuals across the business not to ‘submit’ ideas into some portal (aka black hole), but rather to create the paths, the budget (generated by x% from the stopped projects in the previous stream) and permission frameworks that enable people to fail-small.

The real job of the Director of Failure is “removing the stigma associated with failure to enable teams to become more productive” (Wissam), and to provide the reputational capital required to take risks on projects that may not succeed at first.

Failing small means helping people unearth and test their riskiest assumptions first. It implies containing early failure to hours, days and weeks, rather than months and years. No one’s career depends on trying something and failing small, versus six-month project fails which have high reputational risks.

By encouraging failing small, you are prioritising learning over success, you are helping people to simply get started, rather than over-engineer, over-imagine, or over-complicate their ideas.

I dislike the world ‘culture’ for many reasons, mainly due its nebulous interpretation. Rather, the Director of Failure’s job is to work closely with the CEO and executive team to enable them to change the organisational habits.

Sample metric: An X reduction in time it takes for different types of projects to go from idea to test within the real world.

Interfaces:

To create organisational habits, mindset shifts and strategic capability centred on failure the Director of Failure needs to interface with many others roles. For example:

CxO – the DoF’s focus with C-suite is to align with the strategy of the organisation and form the right relationships of trust to help stop existing failing projects to make more room for success (fail-stop) and fail-recycle.

Middle management – the DoF’s focus with middle (project) managers and directors is to help course correct (fail-forward).

Director of learning and development/HR – the DoF’s focus with the HR department is to help create the structures and incentives that both manage the tension between encouraging failure (fail-small) and avoid failure (fail-avoid).

Getting started:

You may decide, due to cultural sensitivities in your context, you don’t want to label this role as Director of Failure. Maybe it’s called Director of Pivots or Director of Course-correction, but be warned that the clarity, intent and impact of the role could be severely diluted. Maybe you don’t want to call it Director and choose Champion or Coach, but be warned that the danger of this is that it becomes an operational rather than a strategic role.

The typical journey of this new role is that it starts as a hypothesis (this article serves this stage), then it gets turned into a job-add that someone does 20% of the time (side hustle), validating demand and quick-wins, then creates the case for a full-time job-spec, then scales their outcomes to justify a team to impact the entire organisation.

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This post follows previous ones from Head of Experimentation to Head of Stories. All thoughts in this article are my own and not affiliated to any organisation.

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