Success is Failures Learned Well

The wisdom of learning from failure is indisputable. Yet organizations that do it well are extraordinarily rare. This gap is not due to a lack of commitment to learning, says Amy Edmondson in her article in the Harvard Business Review. Managers in the vast majority of enterprises that she has studied over the past 20 years genuinely wanted to help their organizations learn from failures to improve future performance. The common feeling in most organizations is that failure is bad. This leads to the fear of telling the truth, which in turn, can get in the way of learning from past mistakes. The unfortunate consequence is that many failures go unreported and their lessons are lost. A story from the book The Leader, the Teacher and You, by former top Singapore civil servant Lim Siong Guan, serves to illustrate the point well.

When People are Afraid of Telling the Truth

The Singapore Ministry of Defence once decided that the SAF (Singapore Armed Forces) camps should plant papaya trees to enhance the use of land and provide an additional source of nutrition for the troops. As with any initiative, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) were established.

Not all camps were successful despite their best efforts, because some terrains would not yield healthy papaya trees. However, rather than declare their failure, a few units took to buying papayas and papaya trees to keep up with their regular reports of the KPIs. The experiment was finally abandoned when it was plain that some units had perpetually young papaya trees!

'The experiment," writes Lim in his book, "was a lesson in how honesty and integrity can so easily be undermined” when people are afraid of telling the truth. “The opportunity to learn and correct poor ideas in good time was missed.”

In her HBR article, Strategies to Learn from Failure, Amy Edmondson, observes that in most companies, the attitudes and activities required to effectively detect and analyze failures are in short supply , and the need for context-specific learning strategies is under appreciated. Organization, she says, need new and better ways to go beyond lessons that are superficial (“Procedures weren't followed”) or self-serving (“The market just wasn't ready for our great new product”). That means jettisoning old cultural beliefs and stereotypical notions of success and embracing failure’s lessons. She proposes an excellent structured process to review failure and learn lessons from it.

Call to Action

Freedom to make mistakes and learning lessons from it are vital to an organization's success. Allow room for failure, and set up a process to review lessons learnt from it. The scale Praiseworthy to Blameworthy in Edmondson’s article, represents the spectrum of reasons for failure in a scalar form. It can prove an excellent tool to flag-off and institute a process to review failures within an organization. You could use it too!