Fear of failure is something many of us struggle with individually, but within an organization it can be magnified in a way that leaves everyone paralyzed as they attempt to go about their day-to-day work. Not only a terribly inefficient way to do business, this state of fear stifles creativity and innovation, creating a very unhealthy setting for growth. Being conservative is one thing, but when a fear of falling short leads to the refusal of members to push the envelope, organizations are destined for stagnation and eventual failure.
This conversation came up in my squadron at a recent training day. The issue involved pilots and loadmasters trying to accomplish the mission with the constant fear of a Q3 (Air Force speak for a documented failure or breech of standards doled out by squadron leadership) hanging over each of their heads if they messed up. A Q3 isn’t necessarily a career-ender, but it stays in your permanent record and can have negative consequences for future assignments or promotions.
Many pilots and loadmasters voiced a similar complaint that went something like this, “Q3′s are handed out like candy in our organization even for small mistakes, no other community gives out Q3′s as much as ours. Basically, we know that if we mess up in anyway, we’re going to get hammered, no matter what.”
The squadron leadership countered that they held us to a higher standard than other organizations and accepted less margin of error. Additionally, they were concerned that by easing up or taking Q3′s off the table that we would take advantage and become lazy or disregard procedures.
The debate went on for over an hour and centered around one question:
How does an organization cultivate healthy risk-taking without losing control?
Obviously organizations can’t take the Q3 (fill in your own organization’s hammer equivalent) away completely, as there are times when people do something very stupid or dangerous and must be held accountable. There must be a negative incentive for recklessness and negligence or it will slowly become acceptable to take unreasonable levels of risk.
On the other hand, when Q3′s are the go-to punishment for even the most minor mistakes it causes every pilot and loadmaster to second-guess every move they make, call home for every decision and seek cover from leadership before ever even thinking about stepping out on the limb. It’s like swatting a fly with a hammer. Hammers aren’t very precise and should only be used as a last resort, not the go-to instrument of punishment when things go wrong.
Innovation requires risk and inherent in risk is the occasional mistake. In an environment where every mistake is severely punished, the career field stagnates, no new techniques or methods are developed and leaders turn into cowards rather than heroes.
This isn’t the first time an organization has wrestled with this type of dilemma. Every day leaders must make decisions on how to react to missteps and poor decisions made by their employees. Come off too weak and the fear is that people will walk all over you. Be too harsh and people will either begrudgingly toe the line or simply walk away – neither helpful to the organization.
The military presents two additional dilemmas:
- You don’t have the option of quitting (unless you’ve fulfilled your obligation) so the default mode when faced with an environment of heavy-handed punishments is to be ultra-conservative and never go beyond the minimum required for fear of failure. The attitude becomes one of survival rather than professionalism.
- Unlike some organizations where the cost of failure can be measured in dollars, ours has the potential to be measured in lives. Every time we turn on the jet we hold people’s lives in our hands, not to mention a $200 million piece of equipment. Risk must be taken, but at some point it becomes criminal.
Needless to say, these characteristics present a very fine line for military leadership. How does one encourage troops to push the boundaries of their career field, develop new techniques, improve processes and take risk, but at the same time keep people from getting killed?
A very similar predicament can be found in the medical profession. As a surgeon, how does one develop their skills or new techniques when the consequences for making a mistake often mean a dead body on the table? Cadavers are great, but can only tell you so much. Sooner or later a life has to be put on the line to advance the medical profession. How does a Chief of Surgery manage his people in a way that encourages this advancement, but avoids taking on an unacceptable amount of risk?
After discussing these things and doing some thinking of my own, here are a few solutions I have come up with. The following are a few ways that organizations involved in life and death missions can encourage innovation and risk-taking without being negligent:
1) Accept the Little Mistakes – If you are going to create a system of risk-taking and innovation, you have to accept that mistakes will be made. In his book “Product Innovation Strategy Pure and Simple,” Michel Robert explains that not all mistakes are equal, nor should they be treated as such.
When I worked at Johnson & Johnson in the early 1960′s, a motto permeated the organization: ‘If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not making decisions.’…that is how J&J encourages risk taking. 3M does it in a similar fashion. ‘Make a lot of little mistakes, but try to avoid big ones,’ is 3M’s way of doing the same thing…Innovative thinking requires risk taking. Prudent and calculated risk taking, but nevertheless, risk taking.
2) Practice Harder, Much Harder Than You Play – In our profession we have multi-million dollar simulators whose sole purpose is to replicate our actual flight experience as close as possible. On top of this we have local training missions in the actual jet, but minus passengers or valuable cargo. These are the best places to push the envelope, make mistakes and try new techniques. Unfortunately they are often treated like another box to fill, rather than an opportunity to push the limits.
While organizations may not have actual simulators most have some sort of training mechanism available to hone the skills of its members. Any leader seeking to create an innovative environment must establish the precedent that training time means pushing oneself beyond one’s limits.
Training is the time for experimentation, mistakes and failure…not just another routine mission.
3) Celebrate the Risk-Takers - One of the quickest ways to decipher the values of a company is to observe the people they celebrate. If the qualifications of people receiving quarterly and yearly awards are measured only by the absence of mess-ups, it sends a strong message that sticking one’s neck out on the line and trying something new is not valued or encouraged. Better to toe the line and hope you’ll be recognized someday for showing up to work on time in the right uniform.
Instead, an organization trying to encourage risk taking should be quick to recognize and celebrate those who are doing just that, taking risks! Who cares if they’ve failed a few times along the way. Mistakes made in the attempt of pushing boundaries and testing new ideas (very different than mistakes made by incompetence or negligence) are prime indicators that innovation is occurring, or as J&J was quoted above, “…decisions are being made.”
Hold these people up as an example to the rest of the organization and people will soon realize that risk is something to embrace rather than shun.
4) Trust Your Employees – It is imperative that organizational leadership trust their personnel. If you don’t trust the people working for you, replace them with people you do. This does not mean that it is blind. Like anything in life, trust is something that is earned over time, but some leaders never make it to that point, always choosing to assume the worst, rather than the best. This is a problem.
Part of this trust involves a belief that everyone is working for the betterment of the organization as a whole. As a leader it’s your job to give those working for you the benefit of the doubt when mistakes are made. If the same mistakes happen repeatedly, then address them as such, but the standard posture must always be trust.
At the end of the day every organization must understand that the behavior of each of their members is a direct result of the system they have in place (hat tip to USAFA’s Mgt 303). Leaders can chant risk-taking mantras all day to their employees, but if they punish the first member that falls short in his or her endeavors members will read their call for change for what it really is, lip-service.
In order to cultivate an innovative environment, leaders may have to initially bite their tongue at mistakes they may have punished in the past, whether they like it or not. Until members feel confident that the default mode in their organization is for leaders to back up their employees rather than punish them nothing will change and risk-takers will be replaced by 9-5 sheep.
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Great story and details!
Innovation and learning are key!
I’ve seen the death of too many teams and orgs that didn’t integrate learning and growth into their business model. Life’s not static. Business isn’t static (unfortunately, most people think of business development as a one time, up front activity and don’t plan for changes through the maturity levels).
I’m a fan of a diversified portfolio where you have your flagship projects, but you also invest in innovation. Innovation is how you change the game either in what you do, or how you do what you do. Either play is a great move, but I think Peter Drucker and Michael Gerber would learn towards operational innovation.
I get why a lot of folks shy away from innovation. It’s usually because they’re scope driven and they don’t have the concept of fix time, flex scope. Worse, they don’t get the innovation cycles and how to turn innovations into results — so then they get frustrated by their R&D. Really it’s a matter of knowing the key principles, patterns, and practices for effective innovation. I seriously should write a book here, but I’m finishing my others first. It’s so very needed.
The most important thing though in the end … is vulnerability-based trust. When there’s no innovation, and it’s a risk-averse culture, people don’t grow and they’re afraid to fail. People become scape-goats and it’s just bad joojoo.
@ J.D.,
You bring up some great points, it’s obvious you’ve thought about this before.
I completely agree that innovation and learning are key to building great organizations. I think what happens sometimes is that those elements are stifled by “training” which takes on a form of learning, but is often viewed by employees as another box to fill, something to get done, rather than a real opportunity to develop.
Not quite sure how to fix this, but I think it may involve a bottom-up training approach where employees have more control over their training rather than being told what training they will receive from the leadership.
I also like what you say about people not knowing how to turn innovations into results – I know in my own life that often keeps me from pursuing some of my ideas.
Thanks for your wisdom J.D.!
No. four is good, but I would add – develop an atompshere were it is accepted to “trust, but check” We all need double checking, especially when lives are at stake.
This article hits close to home with me. I’m an Engineer in the Nuclear Energy Industry. As an Engineer I was taught to innovate and use creativity to solve problems.
However, the Nuclear Industry goes to great lengths in order to stifle creativity and risk taking of any kind, and for good reason.
All the negative aspects of risk taking you have laid out are magnified 100X in nuclear. Past mistakes at other facilities have caused catastrophic damage and nearly destroyed the industry. There has not been new construction or a major breakthrough for decades as a result.
With such disaster constantly in our heads, how are we to overcome such fears in order to drive improvement?
@ Man Overboard,
Wow. I hadn’t thought about that industry, but it definitely provides even more challenges, mostly due to poor and misinformed public perception, but as a great teacher of mine used to remind us, “Perception is reality.”
Amazing that safety may end up being the very thing that kills the industry as a whole. Not to dodge the question, but what’s being done about changing the public’s perception about nuclear energy?
It seems to me like until you change the public’s perception of the industry as a whole it’ll be an uphill battle the whole way.
Very well done Cameron.
Without question the level of acceptable risk for any one organization is disseminated over time from the top down and ultimately becomes one of the hallmarks of the organization’s overarching culture. This can be both a strength or a weakness. For large organizations like the military, nuclear industry, or the pharmaceutical industry it becomes very difficult to implement changes in culture quickly as there are in many cases hundreds of thousands of employees to impact.
As a person familiar with the modern state of affairs within the pharmaceutical industry, much has changed since the risk encouraged days of decades past. With regulations from the FDA continually increasing their grip the encouragement for risk within the industry has nearly been completely stifled. As an example, when you seek a patent on a new drug formulary that patent is good for twenty years time. This was the same in the 60s as it is today, the BIG difference being in the 60s is it would take about 4-6 years to get the drug through all of the red tape to be available for legal sale on the market with 16 years of exclusive patent rights to that formulation.
In today’s world, it now takes on average 14 years to get a drug successfully to market with over 80% of formulations failing for one reason or another (often times having nothing to do with the efficacy of the drug). One little mistake in a submission in 100′s of pages of paperwork can signal the death of a potential new drug at worst and about a 2 year delay at best. Of course if a drug sees the light of day it has now only 6 years of patent protection on the market.
This increased era of regulation has really cut the chord on risk taking and it is unfortunate since major breakthroughs never happen without calculated risk from talented individuals.
Again, excellent post.
Really well done, I was glad I got referred to this post.
I work on trust, and you do a great job of highlighting the necessary link between trust and risk. In many ways, your 4th point–trust your employees–requires the first three. I have a lot of respect for the experience and wisdom of the military, and this is a great example of it. A lot of experience, well-considered.
Trust makes for enormously efficient and effective operations. Mistrust breeds exactly the opposite–inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Mistrust can cause untrustworthy behavior, and untrustworthy behavior drives mistrust. If not checked, it rapidly develops negative feedback cycles and turns into vicious circles. Turning it around takes the kinds of activities and attitudes you cite.
I must quibble just a bit with a couple of your commenters. You are right in saying that trust is not blind faith, but when Raymond channels Reagan in saying “trust but check,” I think you’ve left trust. Trust exists somewhere between faith and management control systems. If you’re checking, you’re not trusting. Pick one and do it.
Finally, to Greg’s post, I have in 30 years of management consulting not met a more sheep-like risk-averse industry in its daily interactions than the pharmaceutical industry; at the same time, at a strategic level, it continues to roll the dice, often poorly. I see the pharma industry tale not as a victim of regulation, but of one that behaved rather like the finance industry is behaving today, and having brought regulation down upon it. I don’t see risk taking there, I see rigorous cover-your-ass bureaucratic behavior, reinforced at every level. It is more a result of command and control, short-term, process-oriented, financially evaluated, metrics-giddy management styles than it is of regulation. I see plenty of room for pharma management to practice your principles 1 and 3–and no one doing it. That’s not the government’s fault, that’s a management style.
But these are quibbles. I agree w. all your commenters that you’ve written some fine wisdom here, thanks very much.
Charles, I agree with all of the points you highlighted. The point I (poorly) tried to make was the Pharma is no longer the risk taking industry that Michael Robert alluded to. It is a stagnate realm where only those who point out the mistakes of others are rewarded. The sector is both risk averse and tech averse and is greatly in need of a shot in the arm.
@ Charles H. Green,
It’s readers like you that make blogging so enjoyable! Thanks for the valuable and insightful comments on trust.
As far as the “trust, but verify” debate I think that there is a time and place. Where things go drastically wrong in an organization is when managers feel the need to verify the smallest of daily tasks. If employees sense that leadership is constantly looking over their shoulder they never feel empowered to do their job.
On big stuff, verify, on the small and medium stuff, trust. That’s my two cents at least.