Noelle Federico is CEO of Staff Agency and founder of youth literacy nonprofit A Generous Heart and consulting firm Fortunato Partners.
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Plunging headfirst and full throttle into failure has long been a popular notion championed by Stanford Ph.D.s and innovation-seeking upstarts alike. It’s alluring. It’s disruptive. It’s potentially a path to positive change. However, not all failure is created equal. So the popularized “fail fast, fail often” mindset isn't always the right fit for every team or individual.
Creating a company culture that benefits from individual and collective mistakes requires an understanding of both intelligent and preventable failure. Then, the real work for executives begins as they empower employees and leaders to grow from and adjust to any missteps they encounter.
1. Learn To Distinguish Intelligent Failure From Preventable Failure
Intelligent failure—a term coined by Duke University professor Sim Sitkin in his 1992 article "Learning Through Failure: The Strategy of Small Losses"—is the idea of learning from mistakes through a scientific experimentation model. It’s the process of steadfastly and systematically trying and failing with different iterations until innovation or greater understanding is achieved.
For companies, this approach has a lot of upsides. By experimenting, failing and then asking “What worked? What didn’t? How can we tweak things to make them better?” leadership can ensure the innovation process is moving along the right track. This is “fail fast, fail often” at its best.
Conversely, preventable failure is designed to warn us of avoidable issues. For example, if a worker on an assembly line sees a defect in a system or part, that individual should speak up immediately to ensure the failure is remedied in its infancy. Preventable failures can lead to catastrophe if they're not addressed early.
2. With A Great Culture, Failure Can Lead To Success
Successfully learning from failure starts with a strong company culture. If every employee feels heard, seen and comfortable participating in innovation, then leadership is successfully nurturing the level of psychological safety that builds a strong culture. In other words, it’s vital for a company to cultivate genuine inclusivity across generational, ethnic, social and gender lines, as well as create a collaborative sense of common purpose.
To foster that positive, trust-imbued environment, employees need ways to express their thoughts, ideas and perspectives. This can be through a company town hall, supervisor reviews or another type of feedback loop. When everyone feels supported and empowered, they can approach failure with the mindset that it can ultimately lead to collective benefits.
3. Encourage Intelligent Failure In The Right Circumstances
Celebrate intelligent failure as an opportunity to grow. Encourage teams to keep asking, “Okay, what did we learn?” so they can adjust and move forward accordingly. But sometimes, they may determine that the “fail fast, fail often” approach doesn't fit the particular moment, therefore they need to redirect their energy and resources. Knowing when to pause and shift gears is a key part of learning from failure.
For example, a child might see an Olympic swimming event and decide it's her dream to be a swimmer. After joining a swim team, though, she discovers water sports aren’t the right fit. Instead of writing the entire thing off, she realizes the experience unearthed a love for the team sport environment. She may then turn her sights to a sport that better matches her abilities or even realize she wants a job where she can work with athletes. Rather than quitting or giving up on a dream, she's changing direction to a better path.
4. Give Every Employee The Power To Speak Up
To grow from preventable failure, companies need to empower people at every level to speak up and/or act on situations. As Amy Edmondson points out in her book Right Kind of Wrong, ignoring preventable failures can have devastating consequences. For example, the space shuttle Columbia’s explosion in 2003 may have been averted if an engineer’s request for better photos hadn’t been denied. At a Toyota factory, meanwhile, employees are empowered to halt the assembly line's system if they see something amiss. Even when they're mistaken about the potential defect or system failure, the company still celebrates their initiative and willingness to express concerns.
5. Educate And Lead By Example
Throughout the employee experience, training should regularly highlight how intelligent failure can lead to success and how every team member can freely act, without repercussions, when preventable failure crops up. By discussing the nuances, companies can build understanding and encourage employees to embrace these opportunities for growth. Of course, this means leadership—all the way up the chain to the C-suite—needs to walk the walk and demonstrate how to learn from failure, not fear it. After all, fear of failure is no excuse for complacency.
The Takeaway
Embracing failure doesn’t mean putting on blinders and repeatedly launching into the same fumbles and missteps, hoping for a better outcome. But companies that use failures to grow can provide a strong, supportive culture where every individual at every level has the tools to adjust to and learn. So at the end of the day, it’s not about failing with speed or tenacity. It’s about failing well.
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