You Need Mindful Failure

I was talking to one of my favorite customers at a life insurance company and we were talking about risk tolerance. He told me that as an IT organization, leadership was actually pressing the team to take more risks. One of his leaders told the team "It's great to be 3 out of 3, but it's better to be 7 out of 10". While on the surface that is pretty clever, when you dig a little bit, it's actually brilliant.

One of the most intriguing presentations I saw from Gartner Symposium in Barcelona was by Gabriela Vogel entitled Failure Is an Option: How to Make Principled Risk Taking a Part of Your Culture of Growth and Innovation.

Gabriela argues that by establishing the appropriate parameters for risk taking

• Novelty - Is it something new you don't know about?
• Goal Oriented - Are you moving towards something or just seeing what sticks?
• Fact-based - Is it informed by available knowledge?
• Small Enough - Do you have a minimum viable proposition to test?
• Safe - Is it within your core principals?

you are able to design for intelligent failure in your innovation.

You can then design what your acceptable risk profile is. What are you willing to test, what are you not? If you are in government with an appropriated contract, you can't mess with budget, so not have acceptable risk for it. However, you might be good with taking tradeoffs in sustainability.

Understanding what you are willing to risk where, informs you position on what to do next to get to your minimum viable proposition. You can then begin to test your ideas with the right risk profile.

But not all failure is created equal. It's not a reason just to dump a bunch of money, time, and people into something half-baked, Gabriela does a great job of summarizing -

The key is to take the smallest, most meaningful chunks we can and go experiment. We can learn only so much from reading and theory. We can gain efficiency from practice as we manage day-to-day, but we only really learn from failure - what doesn't work, why didn't it work, what didn't we do, why didn't we do it another way, what got us to that point?

But what we end up with is not only the wins from the eventual success, but expanding our body of knowledge over our competitors by what doesn't and as often as not, you're going to succeed faster, because we're not setting out to fail, but to learn, to expand our body of knowledge.

So back to my insurance friends. By shifting their acceptable risk profile, not only are they looking at ways to go faster, but they are going to get more wins, and when they do have failures, they are going to learn more from them.

This is the heart of a blameless culture. Just like I wrote about with automation not having to be perfect, it is the organizations that embrace failure as learning rather than punishment that will win.

Would love to hear about your mindful failures.