What does “failure” mean to you? Are you clear on the difference between mistakes and experiments that don’t work? According to Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School (HBS) and author of Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, that distinction is a critical one many leaders miss. Mistakes are avoidable errors, while failed experiments are a necessary part of venturing into new territory— something people, teams, and companies need to do in order to learn, grow, and innovate.
Failure Can Be Good or Bad
Defining failure as “an outcome that deviates from desired results,” Edmondson says that most executives view failure in one of two ways, and they typically build organizational cultures that reinforce these views:
Have zero tolerance of failure. Executives with a “failure is not an option” mindset put a great deal of emphasis on succeeding by avoiding failure. That often leads to a pervasive fear of failure and a lot less risk-taking, which can hinder innovation. It also leads to hiding the failures that do occur.
Embrace failure as a source of fresh ideas and innovation. Other executives espouse the mottos “fail early and often” or “fail fast, break things.” But experiments are not useful in every situation, and undisciplined experimentation can lead to a lot of activity for little benefit.
The problem with this binary framing is that neither approach alone leads to long-term success. In some situations, it’s highly appropriate to minimize failure; in other situations, it’s smart to embrace experimentation that includes the possibility—or even likelihood—of failure. For executives, the key is knowing how to identify the right approach for each specific challenge.
The theme of good versus bad failure runs through much of Edmonson’s work. Her findings led her to identify three major types of failure: basic, intelligent, and complex.
Basic Failures: When We Know What To Do But Don’t Do It
When executing a well-understood or well-documented process, the task at hand is following the steps laid out. From hiring and firing to safety protocols and beyond, leaders need to communicate the process clearly and make it as easy as possible for others to follow the steps efficiently.
In this context, the things that go wrong are what Edmondson calls basic failures—undesired results caused by mistakes or errors that can and should have been caught and corrected, or prevented in the first place. These kinds of failures result when people stray from a process that is known to be successful, reinvent the wheel (perhaps poorly) because they failed to identify best practices, overlook steps that would make the process much more efficient, or even violate best practices intentionally.
Ideally, organizations work to prevent basic failures, whether through better training, clearer communication, better research into best practices, or other actions. As an example, consider the careful steps hospitals take to ensure that patients are not accidentally misidentified—such as having staff scan wristbands and repeatedly check the patient’s name and date of birth. Clearly it would be very bad if a patient were given the wrong medication or the wrong procedure, so the organization actively works to prevent such basic failures.
Intelligent Failures: When Experiments Don’t Pan Out
In many cases, though, executives are tasked with a problem that doesn’t have a clearly defined process or identifiable best practices—this could be anything from creating a new business model to bringing a new kind of drug to market.
What are the right steps when venturing into new territory? In an ideal scenario, you come up with provisional approaches to the problem, despite limited information and uncertainty, and conduct experiments. You do a lot of testing, try out ideas, and find that some of them just don’t work. You can then learn from these failed experiments and design new experiments that are likelier to succeed. These failures are what Edmondson calls intelligent failures. One key challenge is knowing when to focus on preventing mistakes and when to encourage experimentation and intelligent failure.
The goal is not to avoid failure at any cost, but rather to avoid bad failures and embrace learning from good, intelligent failures.
Amy C. Edmondson; Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management
Knowing When to Fail (Intelligently)
Edmondson lays out key attributes of situations that call for potential intelligent failure—and some hard questions to ask yourself before diving in.
Excerpt from Right Kind of Wrong, The Science of Failing Well by Amy Edmondson
Attribute: Takes place in new territory Diagnostic Questions: Do people already know how to achieve the result I’m pursuing? Is it possible to find a solution some other way, thus avoiding failure?
Attribute: Opportunity driven Diagnostic Questions: Is there a meaningful opportunity worth pursuing? What goal am I hoping to accomplish? Is the risk of failure worth taking?
Attribute: Informed by prior knowledge Diagnostic Questions: Have I done my homework? Before I experiment, do I have the available relevant knowledge? Have I formulated a thoughtful hypothesis about what might happen?
Attribute: As small as possible Diagnostic Questions: Have I mitigated the risks of taking action in new territory by designing an experiment that is as small as possible, while still being informative? Is the planned action the “right size”?
Attribute: Bonus: you learned from it! Diagnostic Questions: Have I mined the lessons from the failure and figured out how to put them to use going forward? Have I shared this knowledge widely to prevent the same failure from happening again?
Complex Failures: When Multiple Mistakes Create a Perfect Storm
The most difficult kind of failure for people and organizations to deal with, complex failures can be quite significant and consequential: think of catastrophic oil spills or collapsed buildings.
When a disaster of this nature happens, we want desperately to find a single cause and to assign blame. That’s human nature. But for most complex failures, this instinct is unhelpful. By studying complex failures in many different settings, Edmondson found that they all have more than one contributing factor—multiple otherwise inconsequential mistakes or external forces lined up to produce a perfect storm. Complex failures are never good, but we can learn from them and try to prevent them. Edmondson says complex failures are on the rise today, in part because businesses rely on increasingly complex information technology systems. To prevent complex failures, leaders can start by analyzing historical failures and then apply that learning to the systems in place today.
Just as important, leaders need to heed early warnings and express appreciation when people speak up with a concern. Yes, you may have to deal with some false alarms, but you may also receive alerts that prevent serious problems. “Making sure that everyone is heard,” says Edmondson, “is not a matter of good manners or inclusivity for its own sake. Voice needs to be cultivated lest crucial voices be lost.”
Fostering a Healthy Failure Culture
The goal is not to avoid failure at any cost, but rather to avoid bad failures and embrace learning from good, intelligent failures. Remedies to three common challenges can help your company avoid “failing at failure”:
Challenge 1
Aversion—an instinctive emotional response to failure
Solution: People are failure-averse by nature. But by reframing the way you talk about failure, you can help your team acknowledge that failure can sometimes be good and is always a source of learning.
Challenge 2
Confusion about good and bad failure
Solution: Communication is key. Give your team a framework for categorizing failure and help them understand the differences between intelligent failures and mistakes.
Challenge 3
Fear of failure
Solution: The antidote to fear is psychological safety, an atmosphere where team members don’t fear rejection for being wrong. When they feel psychologically safe, team members can take on new challenges with greater confidence and pursue thoughtful experimentation, and they can speak up quickly when they make or see a mistake before it leads to a larger failure.
There can be no innovation without intelligent failure. A healthy failure culture, then, is one that rewards intelligent failure—while not rewarding people who never take risks. It fosters development of improved awareness while recognizing that human beings are fallible. To know whether you have a healthy failure culture, advises Edmonson, think about what you hear from the people who report to you. If they’re only discussing good news and assuring you that all is well, that might make you feel good, but it could mean that people don’t feel safe speaking up with problems, concerns, and questions. In that case, it might be time to reset your team’s thinking on failure.
