There's no doubt that failure has a bad, and somewhat persistent, smell. Business leaders will try all ways to avoid it happening, and go to great lengths to hide it if it does (inevitably) happen. The 'avoid failure at all costs' attitude is endemic in commercial organisations, and it's this very attitude that is one of the greatest blocks to growth I see when I work with them. In lumping together every failure, no matter the cause or effect, we are adopting a simplistic attitude that is detrimental to learning and growth - we really need a better standard of conversation when we talk about failure.
Professor Amy Edmondson's 2024 book, 'Right Kind of Wrong' helps us towards a greater understanding of failure by categorising three types:
- Intelligent Failure - something that is considered and planned to furnish learning that will guide future action
- Basic Failure - everyday occurrences that are often easily preventable
- Complex Failure - much more serious but very often due to a series of basic preventable failures that add up to something much bigger
The latter two of these should be familiar to anybody working in an organisation today - the small things that irritate and can so easily compound into major failings. The sheer complexity of operating environments means that there are failure-traps everywhere - an individual can't be expected to be right all the time can they? Probably not..... but maybe we can make a team more conscious of failure, and more pro-active in working with it?
I regularly use a combination of tools such as Challenging Assumptions, Counter Intelligence, Simmetrics and Team Fusion to get a team to reconsider their attitude to failure and perhaps re-frame it as a collective responsibility. If we can develop a team culture that has a high level of psychological safety we can make it OK for team members to be looking out for one another, spotting potential problems, sharing know-how and accepting responsibility. (The third article in this series will be looking at how). These are all activities that need individuals to be detail-conscious and risk-aware, and building a programme around them will allow the consequent learning to be transferred back into the workplace.
Intelligent Failure needs a different experiential approach, as demonstrated by Amy Edmondson in collecting material for her book. She used a laboratory approach based on RSVP Design's activity Electric Maze® (the newer version is EM4 Electric Maze®) to "teach insights about the social and psychological challenges facing employees who must engage in collaborative learning." EM4 Electric Maze is a grid-patterned rug with 48 squares implanted with electronic programmable sensors that beep when pressure is applied. The facilitator programs the EM4 in advance to create a pathway of non-beeping contiguous squares from one side to the other. Because students have no information about how to traverse the EM4 correctly, experimentation- a systematic iterative process of trial and failure- is needed to develop a solution.
When faced with the EM4, team members are in a situation where they have no knowledge of what will bring them success, they need to acquire that knowledge by stepping onto the grid squares and 'risking the beep'. In this situation each beep is a bit of data that will help them, it should be welcomed as a step towards success, but it's amazing how programmed people are to reacting to the beep as failure. Working with the EM4 helps the team to have what Amy calls a "beep-forward" attitude that helps them to value the learning they might once have considered as failure.
