How Not To Flunk At Failure

Silicon Valley has made something of a fetish about celebrating failure. Aside from the self-serving nature of that attitude - the success rates of startups are so miniscule that taking any other position would  discredit most of the people who work in the industry - it appears, as the following article explains, that figuring out how to actually learn from failure is harder than it sounds. JL

John Danner and Mark Coopersmith report in the Wall Street Journal:

Executives can learn a lot by failing. But few people actually know how to do that.
We all know we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes, and we’ve heard the mantra of “fail often, fail fast” and “embrace failure” from Silicon Valley.
It sounds so simple. But this is harder to pull off than it sounds. For one thing, it’s no fun to admit our mistakes. But it’s also tough to accept the likelihood of failure in a culture (and market) that expects ever-higher levels of performance. And we don’t want failure to excuse incompetence or halfhearted effort.
In other words, it’s easy to flunk failure itself, and miss the valuable insights it holds as a strategic resource to accelerate innovation, drive growth and strengthen employee engagement.
So how can executives put failure to work? How can they turn it from a regret to a resource that advances their agenda? Here are four practical steps:

1. The first step: admit you’ve had failures yourself

Many executives refuse to acknowledge any of their failures, much less recognize or productively engage with failure in general, for fear of compromising or undermining their status and goals. But they’ve got that all wrong: Too much emphasis on creating a culture where “failure is not an option” can lead to deception, cover up and the potential for much larger failures.
So executives need to start by acknowledging their own fallibility—a little humility and even humor can really pay off here. Sharing a few personal failures, especially where they demonstrate how some ultimately contributed to future successes, encourages others to be more open, sooner, about potential failures-in-the-making. If colleagues can flag those earlier, it provides precious time and awareness to minimize the severity of the failures that may otherwise fester.
Talking openly about failure also demonstrates that executives truly understand the importance and implications of “trial and error.” Far too often we see leaders advocate for this type of strategy, but their actual response to failure more realistically promotes a culture of “trial and terror,” stifling the very behavior they want.

2. Ask the right questions when the inevitable failure occurs

Your product-development team just hit a serious unexpected roadblock in the design lab that may jeopardize the product launch date. If your first question to them is “who was responsible?” you might as well say you’re more interested in assigning blame than figuring out what new insights are embedded in this failure.

 Instead, executives need to start with the more important “what, where, how and why?” questions in a spirit of genuine inquiry rather than witch hunt. It encourages trust and openness, not to mention better understanding of what strategic changes are needed. Executives should also be prepared to show a little humility, even humor, in sharing some of the failures they’ve been part of but survived, the wiser because of them.

3. Borrow a page, or at least a term, from the lab

Most corporate leaders like to talk about their commitment to innovation. But few have much evidence to show for their efforts. Executive enthusiasm for the strategy du jour begets confidence that they’ve figured everything out. That, in turn, makes it harder to admit mistakes and change direction.
Instead, executives should consider using the language and logic of experiments instead. After all, aren’t most new strategies, initiatives and projects a business version of experimentation—full of assumptions needing to be tested and either proved or disproved in the real world? Scientists expect negative as well as positive outcomes from the experiments they conduct, as they search for new knowledge. That’s how the scientific method of discovery-driven trial and error works.

4. Make the ending count

Leaders may not be able to prevent failures from happening in the first place, but they can determine how they end for the teams and individuals involved. Behavioral economists have shown that our future expectations are influenced greatly by our memories of how emotionally powerful experiences end. And those endings directly affect whether an organization’s fear of failure will unnecessarily compromise its ability to generate the kind of creativity and innovation you probably need to grow.
Severin Schwan, CEO of Roche Holding AG RHHBY -0.42 % , hosts champagne lunches to honor lab teams whose noble efforts did not pan out as hoped. As he says, “I would argue, from a cultural point of view, it’s more important to praise the people for the nine times they fail than for the one time they succeed.”
As we learned during our work with the Great Place to Work Institute, the best workplaces are formed on a foundation of trust; and trust is forged or lost not when things are going great, but rather when they’re not. That’s when team members really learn whether their bosses and peers have their backs. After all, failures aren’t usually the result of stupidity, laziness, carelessness or ill will; they’re a reflection of mistaken assumptions, misplaced resources, nimble competitors and even bad luck.
Failure is a strategic resource. Like the people you employ, the money you spend or the facilities and technologies you use, it has unique intrinsic value if you’re open and wise enough to manage it as such. Treat it like unrefined ore that needs to be processed and examined to reveal its riches. Failure is reality’s way of showing you what you don’t yet know, but need to learn. It contains the seeds of precisely the insight you’ve been looking for, if you have the honesty and humility to explore those secrets.
After all, you’ve already paid its tuition. You might as well get the education that goes with it...and stop flunking failure.