You’ve read it in the business press a hundred times: Failure is necessary for innovation. You’ve read it, but you probably don’t believe it. Or at least, you don’t believe that failure is the way to get promoted or to get a big salary increase, or to get that dream job down the road. And, it’s not exactly true that failure leads to innovation; it’s how failures are handled that determines whether innovation results.
This morning’s Wall Street Journal has an article, “Better Ideas Through Failure”, that contains stories from several companies that have figured out how to manage failure.
Grey New York, an ad agency, gives out a “Heroic Failure” trophy once each quarter, to the person who takes a big, edgy risk and fails, even though the idea had clearly seemed like a good one.
At SurePayroll, a payroll services company in Illinois, they now give out a “Best New Mistake” award: If you are trying hard, make a mistake, and learn from it, you’re eligible for the $400 reward.
In my book Group Genius, I give a few more examples of how innovative companies integrate failure into their culture. I talk about how the Italian design firm Alessi has a “museum of failed designs” that they proudly display; how the California design firm IDEO has a similar room filled with failed product ideas. I also describe the research that shows that serial innovators always fail more than everyone else, simply because they have more total ideas than everyone else. It turns out that creativity is a numbers game: exceptional creators are people who have ideas all the time. As I say in Group Genius, “Fail often, fail early, fail gloriously” (p. 178).
The Creativity Guru 
This si such an important concept. We are neither comfortable with nor tolerant of mistakes. By extension we are not comfortable with thinking/doing outside the box. Safe is valued – in schools, in jobs, in parenting and thus we lose out on all the million ideas that are the “what ifs” in children and young people and grown up minds…
Keith, I remember a wonderful story a small firm told at Marcia Conner’s Creating a Learning Culture conference back in the early ‘oughts. They couldn’t celebrate failure, but didn’t want to make it unsafe to share. So they shared how they rang a bell, not when the mistake was made, but when the lesson was learned. It seemed all too apt; being able to share the learning, without focusing on the failure.