by Merle Symes, author of “The Innovation Edge: How Large Companies Lose It And How To Get It Back“
A managerial mantra has emerged that is expected to lead organizations to new waves of innovation. That mantra is: fail fast and fail often.
While this represents a positive notion, the net result of strictly adhering to this approach is mostly a lot of failure. When translated into everyday operations, it effectively is throwing a lot of stuff at the wall and hoping that something sticks.
True innovation requires going a few steps further and understanding some fundamental principles about failure. More specifically, it is about intelligent failure, a term first coined by Sim Sitkin at Duke University and expanded upon by Rita McGrath at Harvard.
Innovation, of course, always starts with an idea, a vision about how something could be new or different. If it is an improvement to something or something that is a little better than the current ways, it is an incremental innovation. For the purpose of this discussion, I am focused on strategic innovation (breakthrough, disruptive, radical, etc., innovation). Because strategic innovation goes beyond business as usual, it cannot utilize typical business practices – and this is where intelligent failure comes into play.
Exploring intelligent failure
I define a strategic innovation initiative as one that has the potential to completely fail. It is an initiative that is entirely unique, entirely new. In its pursuit, organizations are heading into uncharted waters – new territory that is beyond the current experience of the management team. Because it has the potential to completely fail, it inherently has major risks associated with it.
It is those risks, those major unknowns, that must be addressed through intelligent failure. Intelligent failure is about potentially failing, but failing with a purpose. It is about setting up experiments, doing tests, and finding ways to develop more information. It is about doing a variety of things to convert the unknowns into knowns. Every experiment, every next step is designed to help you develop new knowledge and new insights about the best way forward.
You never want to fail but, if you do, you will have learned something very important. Each one of these steps is carefully designed to either tell you what will work or what won’t work. It is called intelligent failure because you will be smarter than before you took that step. Collectively, these steps, if properly designed, result in a learning and discovery process.
So, what does it take to successfully practice intelligent failure?
First, it takes a structured process and training and development in such a process. It is not just something that comes naturally. If it did, every organization would be flourishing with strategic innovation.
As part of this, I often get asked about what kinds of incentives need to be in place to promote these kinds of processes and strategic innovation. Quite frankly, I find most financial incentive systems to be counterproductive. At their worst, they result in a gaming of the system.
A flourishing innovative environment comes from the right kind of leadership. It is leadership that convinces members of an organization that everyone can be creative, everyone can have good ideas, and that we need to always be on the lookout for them.
This type of leadership opens up an organization to new possibilities and encourages the right kind of experimentation and failure.
Strategic innovation by its very nature requires major efforts. The right kind of leadership can shepherd those initiatives and provide the needed resources in the right place at the right time.
This is about more than telling everyone in the organization that they can spend 10% of their time working on whatever they want. It is about encouraging the organization to find that next big thing, that next major innovation that will spur new learning and growth. Growth provides opportunity, and that is what provides true incentives that drive these kinds of efforts.
Fail fast and fail often has its heart in the right place. It just needs the right kind of approach and the right leadership to elevate it to a level of ongoing success.
Merle Symes, author of “The Innovation Edge: How Large Companies Lose It And How To Get It Back“, leads The Provenance Group, a consultancy dedicated to business innovation and transformation. He works with senior managers and boards of directors to reignite the innovative spirit of mature organizations.