To be a successful leader requires that you continually learn and grow. This inevitably means that you will fail along the way. Yet all failures should not be treated the same as only intelligent failures are able to help you learn and grow.
It used to be we thought that failure was merely the opposite of success. Now we are often choosing between two “failure cultures”—one that is about avoiding failure at all costs and the other is about embracing the idea of failing fast and often. Both approaches miss the important distinction in separating good failure from bad failure and result in missing the opportunity to fail well.
According to Amy Edmondson, author of Right Kind of Wrong: The science of failing well, the three archetypes of failure are basic, complex and intelligent. Those that are basic are due to not trying very hard, not doing your homework, or making too big a bit on it succeeding. Complex failures are caused by many factors that line up or come together in the wrong way. Any one of the factors, on their own, may not cause failure, but when they came together create a perfect storm.
On the other hand, intelligent failures are the “necessary building blocks of discovery.” Intelligent failures can happen only in new territory and where the detriment to failing is as small as possible while learning is achieved.
“A good failure is one that happens in new territory where you can’t look up the answer in advance,” says Edmondson. “It is in pursuit of a goal. It’s driven by a hypothesis. And it’s no bigger than it needs to be for learning.”
In many of the high technology firms I worked for previously, we often took part in postmortems after product launches to honestly acknowledge and own up to where we succeeded and where we failed. These were hard meetings yet where there is a culture of learning and attacking problems rather than people, can be extremely positive and successful.
Edmondson, twice voted by her peers as the number one management thinker in the world, writes that failing well is hard for three reasons: aversion, confusion and fear. Aversion is about an instinctive emotional response to failure; confusion occurs when there is a lack of access to a simple, practical framework for differentiating between failure types; fear is due to the social stigma of failure.
I’ve found that I can learn a lot about an organization by how it treats failure. Those that are overly risk averse likely instill a culture that fosters aversion and fear. They say directly or indirectly that mistakes should be avoided and reduced at all costs.
Perhaps tackling aversion and fear in an organization needs to be done before confusion can be addressed. And it is in this area where Edmondson’s framework for understanding failure types can be most rewarding.
Ultimately, focusing on intelligent failures requires shifting your mindset from knowing to learning, from confidence to curiosity, and being perpetually interested in wondering “what am I missing?” It’s about both critical thinking as well as open-minded thinking.
Embrace intelligent failures so that inevitable mistakes don’t hold you back but bring you closer to success. Only when we learn to focus on failing well will we grow as leaders and organizations.
