Significant Positive Change Requires Failure
It’d be great if there was a silver bullet to give you significant positive change, wouldn’t it? Like a light switch we could win the lottery and transform our business or life overnight. While maybe not as immediate as a light switch, there is a secret sauce.
Innovation, transformation, exponential change requires trying new things. It’s possible, maybe even likely that many of those things won’t result in any meaningful result. It was Thomas Edison that famously said: "I have not failed once. I've just found 10,000 ways that didn't work.” And when something doesn’t work out how you hoped, what do you do? Many of us have the natural human response: hide it, move it away, sweep it under the rug. Because why would anyone want to look bad (to co-workers, clients, Wall Street)?
The secret sauce to significant positive change is exactly the opposite. It’s sharing those failures.
Anyone can avoid risk and play it safe. Sharing failures is hard. I get it. But there’s value in it. It broadens the discussion for others to contribute new ideas, new thinking and new ways to go about solving the problem. It also does something else, it makes it ok for those around you to try new things (and potentially fail). When we’re taking more attempts at success, taking more shots on the goal, we’re more likely to win as an individual or a group.
Tata, the Indian conglomerate, created a prize for the Best Failed Idea. The aim is to spark innovation and keep the company from avoiding risks. Or take Brighton-based social media company Nixon McInnes with the Church of Fail as a monthly ritual. Employees are invited to stand and confess their mistakes, and are wildly applauded for doing so.
We still should share the good. But also the bad and the ugly. Especially the ugly. It’s by sharing the results and making it ok for others to fail that it creates a culture of innovation. A culture where you learn how to do things better. I failed before. I sold my first company to be part of a group that raised 550M before going bankrupt. Talk about a big failure. Yet I’m still here. Potentially better for it.
You see it from some of the best known companies of the day with some of the biggest failures. Remember the Apple Newton? A “devastating failure” for Apple. But they learned from it and eventually came out with something better with the iPhone and iPads. Or remember the Amazon Fire Phone? Amazon is probably hoping you forgot. They swallowed a USD 170,000,000 loss on it. But they too moved on and some of the learning from that “failed” project allegedly went into Alexa.
When failure isn’t visible, it creates a culture where it’s not ok to fail. And breakthroughs are non-existent. Sharing failures allows us to learn from them, build on them and inspire those around us to do the same. If we take that on, we can’t help but cause the change we’re looking for.