Failing Forward

Groan!! I hope we never do that again.
- A typical sentiment felt by many. How do we move beyond hoping to active change?
Failure is to be used as a learning and development opportunity, fearing failure limits success.
Many people shrink away from the idea of failure. The very word conjures up negative images and undermines confidence to achieve and excel. There are two primary ways of dealing with failure -or perceived failure. There is a potential of sinking to a victim "Woe is Me" mode, or the more enlightened mode of taking it as a learning opportunity . The aim is an organization of people who are more flexible and adaptable to deal with changes that occur.
Leaders have the responsibility of giving people the freedom and authority to fail, but ensure there are safety nets in place to protect the follower and organization from failure. It is important to be very clear on where failure can and should be tolerated and where it will not be tolerated.
“Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.”
Kenneth Boulding

To become more successful, one must be willing to fail more often, and far more importantly, when failure does come, take the steps to learn from them. The April 2011 Publication of Harvard Business Review is devoted to failure and learning from it. A good article by Rita Gunther McGrath of Columbia Business School states "failure... If managed well can be a very useful thing". There are four main elements to learning from failures.
• Clarity on Objectives
• Convert assumptions to knowledge
• Design in small chunks, learn quickly
• Establish a culture of sharing

In many ways experience is like capital, you can invest your own and hope for a return. alte
ately you can leverage the experience of others. In order to maximize the return of your own experience investment, the advice in the Harvard Business Review Article is good to follow. Clarity begins with objectives, which reflect the values of the leaders, and continues with periodic assessments. Thus, it is a good idea to conduct Post Event Reviews for every event, to capture the things done well and how to improve for next time. Bore down to the specifics without apportioning blame. When things are done in smaller chunks these post event reviews accumulate beneficial concepts early. Often to the benefit of later stages of the project.
Leverage what can be learned from others failures as well. Be a student of other processes and functions that have faced similar challenges. Leveraging what others have learned can be met through coaching and observation. It is crucial to adaptability in the organization to work from a consistent understanding, and this can best be accomplished by using a proven system. This would entail clear values, clearly stated objectives, well understood and used means of measuring, and re-evaluation.

A leader should give the autonomy and authority for others to fail, but have a safety net in cases they do. The interesting part of this is it applies to self-leadership as well. This is not to say leaders should never risk but accept the scope of consequences of risk. The scope positive and negative become the safety net. When we learn form errors we create a safety net for future performances.