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.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Here are some good links on failure that I’ve come across in the past few days:

From Fast Company, “10 Web 2.0 Ideas that Failed.“  A great look at the other side of the revolution that has brought us Facebook, Twitter, etc.  I like this post because it doesn’t just stop at labeling them failures, but tries to uncover why they failed.

From BoingBoing, “Iran: You Suck At Photoshop,” a hilarious look at Iran’s recent failure to photoshop some of the images from it’s recent missile launch in an attempt to make themselves look more, uh, scary.

A New York Times interview entitled, “Overcoming the ‘Sway’ in Professional Life,” with the authors of the book, Sway. “…a provocative new book about the psychological forces that lead us to disregard facts or logic and behave in surprisingly irrational ways.”  Interesting look at the failure of the interview process to select the best candidate for a job, first impressions, and the need for staying in touch with your customers.

And finally, for all of you pilots out there, some hilarious examples of a failure in communication between pilot and maintenance, taken from ComingAnarchy.com:

The intro to the list explains,

“After every flight, UPS pilots fill out a form, called a ‘gripe sheet, which tells mechanics about problems with the aircraft. The mechanics correct the problems, document their repairs on the form, and then pilots review the gripe sheets before the next flight. Here are some actual maintenance complaints submitted by UPS pilots (“P”) and the solutions by maintenance engineers (“S”).”

Here’s a teaser for you, see the full list here:

P: Left inside main tire almost needs replacement.
S: Almost replaced left inside main tire.

P: Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough.
S: Auto-land not installed on this aircraft.

P: Something loose in cockpit
S: Something tightened in cockpit

P: Noise coming from under instrument panel. Sounds like a midget pounding on something with a hammer.
S: Took hammer away from midget

Popularity: 1% [?]

As I mentioned several weeks ago, I have been thinking a lot about failure.  Why are most of us so afraid of it?  How does it really impact our lives?  How do some types of failure impact us more than others?  And why don’t we discuss it as much as we do success?

Failure happens all around us. As British economist Paul Ormerod points out in his book, “Why Most Things Fail,” failure impacts every area of life.

Failure is pervasive.  Failure is everywhere, across time, across place and across different aspects of life.  Ninety-nine point nine nine per cent of all biological species which have ever existed are now extinct…On a dramatically shorter timescale, more than 10 per cent of all the companies in America disappear each year.  Large and small, from corporate giants to the tiniest one-person business, they fail.

But, most of the time we would rather focus our attention on the winners.  Think of how many books on the business shelf at Barnes & Noble highlight companies, investors and products that are succeeding; each book offering ten easy steps to replicate their incredible path of victory whether or not they are accurate or even relevant.

It’s understandable.  Winners make us feel good and feed the fire of our hopes and dreams as we attempt to learn their secrets and imitate their actions.  And talking about failing, well, it’s just depressing.  The simple act of reading this post will probably cause some uber-positivity bloggers to commit hara-kiri.

Yet, when we dismiss the losers and focus all our study on the winners, we are missing out on an incredibly rich source of information and wisdom–the very wisdom necessary to avoid making the exact same mistakes in our own lives AND the wisdom that is often more relevant and applicable than the “10 Easy Steps” path to success.

What did the guy learn who came in second place, or last for that matter?  Do you really know what caused the collapse of Enron or are you guessing?  What were the steps in the chain that led to the Challenger and Columbia disasters?  Why did your Grandfather end up broke and living off welfare?  These are questions we need to be asking.

The key to all of these questions is realizing that they could happen to any of us…unless we learn from them.  No one wakes up one day and says, “Today, I plan on completely failing!  I’m going to cheat on my wife, then run my business into bankruptcy so one day I can be a homeless alcoholic begging for food outside of McDonalds.”  I’m not suggesting we quit studying success stories altogether, but failure is much sneakier than it’s counterpart.

Failure is insidious by nature, no one expects it will happen to them and therein lies its power.

Lieutenant General (Ret.) Hal Moore, the heroic commander portrayed by Mel Gibson in the movie “We Were Soldiers,” understood this principle well. In one of my favorite scenes, Moore is reading late at night in his study about what else?  Failure.  Specifically, the bloody defeat of the French at the hands of the Viet Minh, quickening the end of French rule in Indochina.  Moore knew he would soon be neck deep in the Vietnam conflict and the lessons learned from the French failure would be of great value to him as he led his men into a similar environment.

At multiple points throughout the conflict, Moore has flashbacks to his previous studies and makes decisions based on what he had learned.  In doing so he ensured that him and his men would not suffer the same fate as the French.  Moore had already seen failure through the eyes of the French commanders a decade earlier, so he had no need to see it himself.

Failure is always the result of something else. If you look at almost every famous failure throughout history you will see a chain of seemingly insignificant events, a destruction chain that had may chances of being broken along the way, but ultimately grew unchecked until judgment day.

Check out some of the factors at play in the Columbia disaster which killed 7 astronauts, destroyed $4billion of spacecraft and left debris scattered over 2000 sq miles of Texas:

From the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, see full presentation here

Physical Factors:

• Insulating foam separates from external tank 81 seconds after lift-off
• Foam strikes underside of left wing, breaches thermal protection system (TPS) tiles
• Superheated air enters wing during re-entry, melting aluminum struts
• Aerodynamic stresses destroy weakened wing

Flawed Decision Process:

• Foam strike detected in launch videos on Day 2
• Engineers requested inspection by crew or remote photo imagery to check for damage
• Mission managers discounted foam strike significance
• No actions were taken to confirm shuttle integrity or prepare contingency plans

You may be asking, “Why did the mission managers not feel the foam strike was a significant enough issue to warrant a new plan?”

Easy, foam shedding had come to be viewed as normal because it had occurred on so many missions before.  This in spite of the fact that a Ground System manual stated, “…No debris shall emanate from the critical zone of the External Tank on the launch pad or during ascent…” The unspoken doctrine became, “Foam shedding hasn’t hurt us before, so why should we expect it to in the future.”

All this and we haven’t even looked at the issues with budget cuts and haphazard safety inspections.  What am I getting at?  The Columbia disaster did not happen on re-entry, it happened over many years as deviations became normalized and a culture was produced that viewed non-failure as success. The disaster chain could have been broken many times along the way, but it was not.

By studying why things fail we get a chance to see our own flaws, weaknesses and blind spots before they become a long and complex destruction chain.  If we can do this we then free ourselves to focus on the intricacies of success in a much more realistic context.

Failure happens whether we like it or not.  Those who deny it’s existence and pretend that happy thoughts and a few self-help books will give them a free ticket to success soon discover that we live in a fallen world.  By confronting and studying failure at every step we don’t fall victim to it as easily.  And if we’re thinking about it and planning accordingly, it ceases to have the same power over us.  So, one last time, let’s hear it for the losers.

Resources:

“Why Most Things Fail” by Paul Ormerod

Lessons Learned From the Columbia Disaster, “Safety & Organizational Culture” American Institute of Chemical Engineers.  2005

Popularity: 2% [?]

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

- Theodore Roosevelt

A longtime favorite quote of mine that mentions failure.  More on failure to come…

Popularity: 1% [?]

Recently my family and I, along with a couple of our friends, visited the 6th Ave district of Tacoma, WA and tried out an Argentinian restaurant called Asado. Since we just moved to the city we were trying to find some new restaurants and this one looked like a good place to start. I ordered the Sea Bass for my main course and a half a dozen oysters for an appetizer. The main courses came out from the kitchen and I noticed that I had never gotten my oysters. So, I asked the waiter and he admitted that he had completely forgotten. Now at this point the night could have gone two ways:

Option A: The waiter could have said, “I’m very sorry, I completely forgot,” and left it at that. He could have just gone on with the meal and I would receive the check and walk away feeling that while I had a great meal, it was just a bit off. Even with this option, the experience would have been a positive one overall and I probably would come back.

The waiter could have said, “I’m very sorry, I completely forgot…would you like to have them with your meal or would you like a complimentary dessert instead.” I would choose the dessert and at the end of the meal our whole party would enjoy a great chocolate souffle cake with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. I would then pay and leave the restaurant having had a great meal and knowing that Asado had great service and valued my experience as their customer. Asado would have just made me their new fan and spokesperson.

The waiter at Asado was wise and chose Option B. To be honest, I really didn’t care that he had forgotten my appetizer, I was too busy enjoying my Sea Bass, but the fact that he didn’t just stop at sorry and instead took the extra step of correcting the situation made a huge impact on me and won a new customer for the restaurant.

What happened at Asado happens everyday and raises an important question, “How do you react when you fail?”  If you are in a service-related organization whether it be a restaurant, retail store or professional service, this is such an important principle to understand. And it’s deceivingly simple.

If you mess up and fall short of the customer’s expectations, sorry isn’t enough. Even if it is sincere and the mistake was honest, people only feel valued if they believe an organization is working hard to make up for their mistakes.  Don’t just say “sorry,” DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

By choosing Option B, a company is making an incredibly lucrative investment. For the price that it cost to make a dessert (approx $2 if I had to guess), they got an enthusiastic customer that will not only come back himself and purchase many more meals (approx $50-$70 for 2 people), but will tell friends to go as well. For a $2 investment they received a return of at least $50 and likely much more over time. What organization wouldn’t want a return of 2,300% (feel free to check my math, I did this early in the morning).

This principle doesn’t only operate in the business-customer relationship, it has consequences inside the organization itself.  As a young employee there is no doubt that you will make mistakes. In fact, as I have been exploring lately, it may be beneficial to fail in certain situations. But, when you fail and have to explain yourself to your boss, remember that sorry isn’t enough. Have a plan to fix the problem and already be in the process of implementing it.

It’s not hard to do the right thing, but it starts at the top of the organization and works its way down. And if the employee interacting directly with the customer doesn’t understand this philosophy, doesn’t feel empowered to implement it, or worse doesn’t care enough to do anything when mistakes are made, the organization suffers more than just a slight mess up, they lose the very people they are trying to serve.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I once had a teacher in 9th grade have us write down some principles for successful living. “Test Fast, Fail Fast” I scribbled down on the back of an assignment. “Wasn’t the point of life not to fail,” I thought to myself. Like a good student though, I folded the list up and stuck it in my wallet. I still have the list in my wallet today. Over the years I have come back to the list and have begun to realize the genius in my teacher’s words, specifically his insight on failure.

You see, what my teacher was getting at was a lifestyle of trying new things without fear of failure. A constant iteration of testing, failing, learning, testing, failing, learning; and all of this very quickly. Simply put, much more is learned from trying and failing then could ever be discovered solely by planning beforehand. And if you walk out this process quickly, you arrive at a success much faster and armed with more wisdom and insight than you ever could by standing on the sidelines analyzing the “fail-free” route.

The American entrepreneurial community has caught on to this idea more than anyone, viewing failure as a badge of honor rather than a scarlet letter. I have been told that some venture capitalists refuse to fund a business proposal put forth by someone who hasn’t previously failed in at least one or two other start-up efforts. Why? The experience of failure brings with it so many side-benefits that the person who has failed is actually better equipped than someone who has never tried before.

Two other people have recently peaked my interest in failure: Brad Feld and J.K. Rowling. Feld is one of the entrepreneurs I made reference to above that has been taking a deeper look at failure on his blog, Feld Thoughts. Check out his posts on failure here.

J.K. Rowling recently gave the graduation address to the class of 2008 at Harvard. She talked about the fringe benefits of failure as well as the importance of imagination. Watch the video of her brilliant speech here. Here is one of my favorite excerpts:

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Over the next few months I plan on making a study of failure and sharing what I discover with all of you. I want to know how we benefit from failure and why we fear it so much as well as how to overcome that fear.

Please send me any links on failure you think might be of interest to me. And comment below with your thoughts and stories of failure and whether or not you think they were valuable.

Popularity: 1% [?]