10x Failing at Work

Facing Failure: Unraveling its Value & Confronting the Stigma

Failure - Value & Stigma

Failure is, by definition, not successful, yet it signifies more than just a failure to reach a goal. While its literal connotation embodies defeat or an unsuccessful endeavor, failure embodies essential life lessons. It is a platform for learning, growth, and resilience. To truly excel in life and in business, it is vital to not only embrace failure, but also the wisdom to choose what to fail on. 

The issue with many work environments today is the stigma around failure. We often tie self-worth and personal value with our successes, burying the disappointments, missed opportunities and failed projects. Embracing failure means recognizing it as a catalyst for growth. Many successful businesses and leaders today owe their success to their stumbles and blunders. 

Take, for instance, Steve Jobs. He was ousted from Apple, the company he co-founded. Not many would be able to bounce back from such a massive setback, but Jobs did. He founded NeXT, another software platform development company that was eventually bought by Apple. His resilience and tenacity in face of failure led him back onto the path of success.

Choose Wisely - Fail Fast, Learn Fast

Innovation and the early adoption of new technologies can carry a significant risk of failure. Yet, without this boldness, an organization may stagnate or become obsolete. The key lies in choosing what to fail on. Failure can contribute to a strategic advantage when approached wisely – fail fast and learn even faster. An ideal way to look at the risk integration of new technologies into an organization’s operations is to liken it to managing a portfolio of stocks.

Just as a successful investor has a diversified portfolio, organizations must also have a well-balanced investment approach for technology. Some money will be invested in proven, tried-and-true systems—these are like value stocks that have consistent returns with lower risk. At Cisco, for every release of Hyperflex, we added support for newer hard drives and flash drives to drive incremental adoption - a relatively low effort but high ROI investment.

On the other hand, it's necessary to take risks on new technologies, software, or services that could potentially give a high return. These are similar to growth stocks that carry higher risk but can yield significant returns when successful. For example, early adoption of emerging tech trends like artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Specifically, Generative AI product development has a very high degree of experimentation.

Foster a Fail-Safe Environment - Generative AI Perspective

Creating an environment that promotes risk-taking while still safeguarding against reckless decisions is crucial to fostering a culture of innovation and growth. In the context of adopting generative AI technologies, this means cultivating an experimental mindset. Companies should aim to move quickly, but thoughtfully. Mistakes and dead-ends are a given, but the willingness to quickly course-correct, abandoning what doesn’t work and continuously moving forward, is what distinguishes a fail-safe environment. 

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the applicability of language AI use cases by lowering the entry barrier for experimentation. They enable companies to prototype and trial different uses easily, making it much less risky and expensive to test new ways of employing AI technology.

However, creating such an environment requires customer service leaders to lead by example, encouraging their teams to embrace failure as a pathway to innovation. Teams should be incentivized to take calculated risks and innovate without the fear of retribution if they fail. 

It's also essential to remind teams that it's okay to pivot or shift directions if initial efforts don't yield the desired results. Sunk cost fallacy – the misconception that one needs to continue down an unproductive path just because resources have been invested, can trap companies into a cycle of fruitless efforts. The ability to recognize when to step back, reassess, and explore alternatives is crucial for efficient and effective growth.

Creating a fail-safe environment also requires the establishment of clear communication channels. Team members should be encouraged to openly share their ideas, concerns, and potential hurdles. By creating a culture of transparency and open dialogue, teams can course-correct more rapidly when confronting failure.

Moreover, it's vital to foster an environment where learning from failure is celebrated. Instead of a blame-game approach, cultivate a culture of constructive feedback and continuous learning. Celebrating learned lessons from failed experiments, and implementing new strategies based on these lessons, can help companies more quickly harness the power of generative AI.

Google’s ‘moonshot factory’ X, mentioned earlier, embodies this experimental mindset in its culture. They value what they call 'smart failure', recognizing that deliberate, well-designed, and quickly executed experiments — even those that fail — provide valuable lessons that move the organization forward on the path to innovation. 

In fostering this type of environment, companies can optimize their use of cutting-edge tools such as generative AI. This approach allows them to remain at the forefront of their industry, continuously innovate, and thereby deliver exceptional value to their customers even in the face of setbacks and failure. Adopting an open, innovative, and fail-safe environment is not simply about accepting failure but about learning to harness it as a powerful tool for growth and improvement. 

Failure(s) + Reflection(s) = Success

Failure is often accompanied by blame, both from the self and others. However, this blame game is counterproductive and doesn't contribute to understanding the lessons that the failure has offered. Instead of pointing fingers, adopting practices like blameless postmortems and project retrospectives can lead to profound learning and improvement.

A blameless postmortem is a process where a team analyzes a project or an incident that did not go as planned. The goal is to understand what happened, why it occurred, and how to prevent it from happening again—all without pointing fingers or assigning blame. 

In such an environment, team members are able to express freely what went wrong in their perspective without the fear of being singled out. This leads to an open, honest discussion and collaboration of the whole team in finding both the contributing factors of the failure and its solution. Implementing the learnings from such postmortems not only helps in preventing the recurrence of such incidents but also strengthens team collaboration and unity.

Similarly, project retrospectives heavily contribute to project management by providing opportunities to review and learn from both successes and failures. After completing a project, teams identify what worked well and what didn't, and develop a plan for improvements that can be implemented in future projects. 

Retrospectives are pivotal in fostering continuous improvement and a culture of transparency and communication within the team. They help identify the strengths to be nurtured and weaknesses to be worked on, both at the individual and team levels. By understanding what didn’t work or could be done better, teams are more equipped to avoid making the same mistakes in future projects.

Consider the case of NASA. In the aftermath of the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttle disasters, there was an exhaustive blameless post mortem investigation. This examination allowed the organization to identify the root causes of these tragic accidents and to develop measures to prevent them from happening again. By taking a blameless approach, they were able to focus less on finger-pointing and more on problem-solving. The learnings from these unfortunate incidents contributed to the subsequent success of many space missions. 

Life, like any complex system, is full of adjustments, learning curves and failure. It's essential that we stop stigmatizing failure as it's not a mark of shame but a source of learning. Utilizing blameless postmortems and project retrospectives in your organization can change how failures are perceived - transforming them from debilitating into empowering. Thus, learning to decode the lessons and feedback from failure is the foundation for cultivating a resilient and innovative organization that is not afraid to take risks for fear of failure. It leads to proactive learning, continuous improvement, and ultimately, a strong, collaborative, and successful team. 

Lastly, consider the practice of 'pre-mortems', a technique often employed in project management, where potential pitfalls and problems are discussed even before a project begins. This preemptive awareness of what could fail can help steer a project or initiative in the right direction, mitigating risks and improving the likelihood of it being a success.

We should keep in mind Thomas Edison's response when asked about his 10,000 unsuccessful attempts to design the light bulb - “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” It concisely encapsulates how failure should be perceived. Not as a dead-end, but as a guiding light, illuminating a path to a better solution, a better process, a better product, and ultimately, a better version of ourselves.

Elevation through Failures

Anyone aspiring to make a significant impact in their lives or within their organizations must heighten their comfort with failure. Fear of failure tends to limit potential and stifle creativity and innovation. However, the power of failure is transformative. It can fundamentally change the way you view risk and opportunities, pushing you outside of comfort zones into spaces of profound growth and success.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, choosing what to fail on is a strategic approach to success. Failures should not be seen as the enemy; they should be interpreted as stepping stones to learning, resilience, and ultimately, success. Embracing failure and cultivating a learning mindset can ultimately lead to a more creative, more resilient, and more successful business or personal journey.

Remember, it's not the failures that define us but how we respond to them. The road to success is always under construction - paved with detours and rough patches. It demands patience, perseverance, and an unyielding belief in the journey. It requires us to explore, experiment, fail, learn, evolve, transform, and grow.

~10xManager