Give us a framework for failure!

You must be intoxicated by now with the overused recipe for success - "encourage failure". While this theory can be straightforward in the form of "accept failure", especially in entrepreneurship, how can this work in a large company, results focused?

It should be absolutely obvious that I am not talking about severe outages caused by lack of knowledge or lack of responsiveness to an undesired event. I am not discussing the inability to deliver results in a well developed and predictable business environment. I am raising the subject of failing in the context of experimentation, as this is the only context in which a failure can be justified and encouraged. Otherwise, how many times can you explain to your customers "You know, don't worry, he have a fault tolerant policy in place. Don't mind the loss we have caused, as we have learned a lot this time."?

I feel like nowadays the encouragement to fail is used in an inflationist manner, without a basis. Some of the people recommending it leave me the impression that they are using it as a propaganda tool, to convince others how great their organization is, that it has the power and good will to forget and forgive. Mistake: failure encouragement seen as tolerance.

Other evangelists of failure talk about the need of it and the immense benefits it brings. Some even allow themselves to throw percents of acceptable fail/success rates. I believe this does not make much sense without a given context and a well defined measurement tool. For example, how big is the impact of inability to perform a required function at some point in time in a field like sales? What about medicine? Do you apply the same judgement to an unattained objective in perfectly playing the violin during a concert and to safely flying a plane?

I have recently asked a top management person (from outside my company) how can one afford to start failing in order to become wiser and smarter. She was a bit surprised about the way I formulated the question. I then explained that the mistake is rather an individual affair, while the learned lessons in the aftermath belong to the entire organization. Despite the fact that is a common statement that, in case of failures, nobody searches for guilty person, but for root causes, the very person which caused the outage will carry a stigma (measurable by the generated loss). The top manager suggested me to investigate the possibility and the probable reactions to failure in my work environment. "If you believe that risk taking would be considered a quality, then be not afraid to try something new which may fail along the way", she said to me. "There are benefits in this for the entire team. But before this, analyse the opportunities you are offered to gracefully fail, without being blamed." Mistake: believe that any environment is suitable for experimentation.

People are reluctant to experiment because they haven't been offered a context to fail and learn.

For as long as I was a student I have been taught that failure is not an option. School clearly pointed me that success is built on success only and mistakes are not part of this game. In this scenario, in case of a failed mission, I was more inclined to find a good excuse instead of looking for the cause. This was the natural way to protect myself from the inherent questions that followed an unfortunate event of a failure. I have heard too many times "who?" instead of "why?", applied to me as well as to my colleagues. How can one have the generosity to experiment on behalf of others in this context? Big mistake: condemn failure.

Innovation is a process of commercial exploitation and application of ideas and inventions and can take the forms of new products, services and methods. The ability of firms to innovate is frequently considered to facilitate firms gaining competitive advantage and enhancing financial performance.

Smith, D. (2010). Exploring innovation. McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Dunk, A. S. (2011). Product innovation, budgetary control, and the financial performance of firms. 

Change in Corporate R&D Spending by Region, 2007–2015 (US$ Billions)

The reason for the above mentioned misinterpretations and inconsistencies is the lack of a framework for failure in most companies (there are, of course, exceptions). There is no well defined context in which one can get his hands dirty. There is no sandbox environment (read as "risk-free" or "guilt-free") in which one can safely experiment. Such a framework could consist in a percentage of employee time dedicated to experimentation. This means budgeted time for innovation. This adventurous time is now reserved to Research and Development departments. You might feel that everybody should be offered the context to feel free to express ideas, to implement and test them, to fail and lose budget, but gain in valuable lessons on the long run. So did the industry giants, at some point. But, then, stopped. 

An innovation system needs to evolve with the business it supports.

I remind Google's example, which promoted their 20% policy for a few years. As of a couple of years, they decided that this was not the best way to spend money and use employee's time. You can read a comprehensive judgement of Google's decision on hrzone.com. They did not abandon their vision on explorations (how could they? why should they?), but instead transformed the way it is implemented. The 20% rule worked in the late era of a startup. But now, that model does not seem to work, so they have chiseled it and concentrated experimentation in R&Ds, the natural way to contain risks, still obtaining the benefits. 

The 2015 Top 20 R&D Spenders

I started to write this article last night, triggered by an attempt to explain myself the roots of a big failure and disappointment. Romania played Albania in EURO 2016 group stage and lost. More than once and not by accident. And went home for that. It was a poor play and a shameful loss, in the end. My team played an old dusty game, without taking any real risks, hence without offering its supporters the joy of watching football. There are ways to lose that make you seem like a hero and ways to lose that show how ridiculous you are. There is the safe game, which everyone knows and does not bring you any remarkable success. And there is the innovative and sparkling game, that gets the crowds standing. My team tonight did not just lose. My team has failed big tonight. It has failed because it was too afraid to experiment, too undetermined to take risks and too shy to be surprising.