A mindset revolution

Intelligent failure • 3 min read

#PsychFact

Many established companies struggle to grow due to fear of failure. In a 2015 Boston Consulting Group survey, 31% of respondents cited a risk-averse culture as a key obstacle to innovation.

However, many venture capitalists won’t invest in a new enterprise if it has never experienced failure.

Social media platform Instagram started out as the failed networking app before they established that their customers were using their photo feature over anything else. The founders then pivoted the app to the form that we now know and sold it a year later to Facebook for $1 billion.

Introduction

We’ve looked at how failure can be a major asset if we’re trying to learn something new, in fact, it precedes many successes.

Today, we’ll take a further look at how we use intelligent failure, failing quickly to generate new options, with problems becoming new opportunities.

Map out the project

When we launch a project, not only can we map out specific tasks, deadlines, and desired outputs, but we can also envisage the process further by defining the project’s scope for innovation and experimentation, this is the area in which we can explore and fail.

We can consider the project in its wider context so that we can pull together our resources accordingly.

Refine through iteration

Now that we have a clearer sense of the project plan, we can break up the project into cycles, using a pattern of iteration through a repeated loop: planning, acting, and then reviewing what has just happened to make an informed choice about the next step.

By breaking down potential issues into smaller parts to establish what works and what doesn’t, this will help us to capture and transfer learning, what we refer to as mini ‘post-mortems’ as a project proceeds and key points are reached.

These checkpoint reviews provide a platform to interrogate errors which may have otherwise been missed. The process also helps to ensure that failures will occur early in the project and on a small-scale.

Share your learning

Our last step is to embed our learning, sharing lessons on a wider scale to apply them to our future efforts.

We can do this by agreeing to the new habits that we aim to preserve, while deciding on the ones that need to go. This allows for personal reflection by highlighting strengths and weaknesses, and specific ways that we can more effectively innovate and manage.

Key takeaways

By failing intelligently, we can map out our project to allow room for innovation and experimentation. Through a process of recorded trial and error, this allows us to reframe failures as opportunities, while clearly connecting our actions to project outcomes.
We can establish a safety net for this process by breaking the project into cycles, minimising risks with checkpoints. The cycle involves: planning; monitoring through data review; and reflection.
As part of our project’s conclusion, we can crystallise lessons which could be invaluable to future projects, while helping to avoid similar problems down the line.

Think big, act small

We’ve seen that failure can be highly beneficial when we extract the maximum value from it.

Can you try your hand at the intelligent failure loop, planning, acting, and reviewing to enable learning and refinement?

You could give it a go and who knows what innovative ideas could emerge to make your creative input stand out in the workplace.

Content sources

Fast Company, 2014, Anjali Sastry, ‘3 Steps for Harnessing Failure The Right Way’
Forbes, 2016, Julian Birkanshaw & Martine Haas, ‘Increase Your Return on Failure’
Forbes, 2018, Julie Chakraverty, ‘Why embracing and discussing failure is good for your company’
Harvard Business Review, 2011, Rita Gunther McGrath, ‘Failing by Design’
Mathew Syed, 2015, ‘Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth about Success,’
Ted X, Mathew Syed, 2016, ‘Why you should have your own black box’
Psychology Today, 2014, Devon Frye, ‘Why You Should Embrace Failure’