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Success out of failure

Whilst failure is a difficult topic for many people, no organisation can innovate without taking risks and accepting failures.

That is not to say that failure is a desirable outcome, it is just occasionally a necessary one. It is how you respond to it that matters.

Bob Sutton suggests "Forgive and Remember" in his blog, warning that forgetting means you may not learn from the failure. Rosabeth Kanter agrees that blame and anger is the road to destruction here.

When it comes to failure and innovation two things are vital:

  • Foster a culture where intelligent risk is acceptable and failure is not a dirty word
  • Ensure you learn from failures

As James Dyson says "Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success".

The NCVO Fail Slam explored Success out of Failure and @Lucyinnovation wrote a blog about it.

For more thoughts read the blog stream below and see one of the speakers, Heather Bewers from KPMG discuss learning from failure.

Success out of Failure: KPMG Guest Blog- Looking for another word for failure

Heather BewersResearch on highly effective teams and organisations shows that one quality that helps them progress to great heights is the ability to reflect and learn.  When it comes to innovation, it is especially important to learn from failure.  If you want your organisation to be innovative, failure must not be a dirty word or no-one will dare to take a risk with a new idea.

Failure: How to make the most of your mess ups

Most people would agree that innovation is a good thing: companies committed to innovating tend to be more successful than those without an innovation strategy. To innovate necessitates taking risks and failure is a by product of risk taking.

If charities are to be more innovative we need to get more comfortable with the ‘F-word’. I am not suggesting that we strive for failure and would certainly advocate well researched intelligent risk taking.  But there comes a point with any new idea that you have to take the plunge.

Success out of Failure: Why we should all say the ‘F-word’ more!

Katherine William-Powlett

 Heather Bewers of KPMG states that her job would be a great deal easier if she could find a better word for 'Failure'.  The word 'Failure' as been ingrained in our psyche as a 'bad thing' since we did our first spelling test and sat our first exams.  Charities often seem particularly averse to the word because funders only want to hear success stories. An organisation that is going to succeed and grow needs to be comfortable with saying the 'F-word'.

If you can't recognise failure, you won't learn from it

Katherine William-PowlettTim Harford has been doing an engaging tour promoting his new book,  Adapt: Why success always starts with failure.  This was of particular interest to me after the NCVO Fail Slam earlier this year. In Waterstones this Sunday Tim talked about the need for trying lots of things and allowing to fail in small ways in order to have bigger successes later, much as I have discussed in earlier blogs on prototyping.  But what really caught my ear was that none of this is any use if you don't know you have failed. How do we know if we have failed?

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