Fruitful Failures
Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections.
You can keep your sterile truth to yourself.
Charles Darwin
I find it interesting that when everything goes well in organisations we record our success as the logical progression of cause and effect, action and reaction that played out just as we foresaw. The brilliance of the leadership and the professionalism of the team are duly noted—reputations are forged.
We look back at our work with a lazy eye to determine the key principles and actions that contributed to the successful outcome. These are subsequently captured as a repeatable method for the benefit of all.
I don’t think we ask hard enough questions of our successes. The evidence to support our assertions of cause and effect are often weak, and based on limited evidence. The majority of leadership and management books filling the shelves of the local retailer attract our attention with the promise of repeatable success.
Our treatment of failure is another matter entirely. Nothing went the way we wanted. Those involved are interrogated about their decision-making and actions. There is a greater burden of proof on those who have failed to show why they should not have succeeded. The search for the factors shaping events is prosecuted with vigour. We are forced to draw new and different lessons from the events. Lessons that enrich our future practice. That’s what should happen!
What often happens after failure is the reworking of the narrative to look like we were nearly successful. Blame is affixed to the actions of individuals because we need to show certainty in our organisational approach. The variability of human behaviour (operator error) is more easily explained as the source of failure—reputations are lost. And, fear of failure finds a firmer place in our culture.
How we respond to failure in our organisations has a profound and lasting impact on not only individual behaviour but also on how much we, as an organisation, learn. Probably. Many organisations profess to have a learning culture, how many could, hand on heart, say they actively, systematically, and forensically learn from failure?
Charles Darwin rejoiced in ‘fruitful failures’. This is the way to think about failure in our organisations. Failure as the source of opportunity. Failure as more interesting and alive than success.
As organisations grow and mature the focus of performance is on efficiency of resource use and the eradication of error. Our experience of work becomes tightly bound to process and task. Work is a series of repeatable events that are predictable but dull. Failure is confined to correcting performance errors in a known system.
The relationship between people, work and organisation is changing rapidly. Failure is a natural corollary of the much vaunted need to embrace the disruption that is said to characterise our times. So, confronted with disruption, do we see failure as fruitful? Are we prepared to learn from those opportunities, or do we continue to subscribe to the illusion of permanent success?
The history of work and organisation is all about cycles of success and failure. How we respond to failure in a time when disruption affects everyone may be the most enduring feature of continued organisational success.
