Rethinking “failure” and “success”
Let’s face it, “failure” has a bad name.
- We don’t like to fail.
- We really don’t like to be seen to fail.
- And we love to follow leaders who portray themselves as never failing.
But are we looking at failure in the wrong way? Does the concealment of failure promote damaging behaviours which make us less effective? How can we as leaders change the way that failure is perceived in our organisation?
A reductionist approach to failure
Central to traditional “Scientific Management” approaches is the belief that work is reductionist and driven solely by cause and effect. In this view, we can set a project goal, plan the work and assess the right way to perform that work.
In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.
F.W Taylor
In this approach, if we can plan all the details of a project, then any failure can be down to only one of two outcomes:
- A failure of planning which did not identify the problem in advance
- A failure of execution where the plan was not correctly followed
This belief in predictability has driven many of the disfunctions of traditional management. The idea that individual skills necessarily correlate with successful outcomes means that any failure must necessarily be the failure of an individual. And in McGregor’s “Theory X” thinking we see the idea that motivation must be extrinsic and managed through reward and punishment.
This drives approaches such as “stack ranking” where organisations attempt to score individual success and punish failure. Naively the idea is that those with least observed success should be removed from the organisation.
As seen in other Plays around metrics and KPIs, high impact measures will drive behaviours which affect those measures. If we punish observed failure, individuals may be able to fail less, but most likely they will ensure the failures are not observed. Managers often find it easier to affect the perception than the reality. A major objective therefore is to conceal failure, deflect blame and to accumulate praise.
An Agile approach to failure
In Agile development, we understand that the environment is complex and that the linkage between actions and outcomes is not predictive. We can reduce the chance of failure by good planning, following good practices and embracing quality. But what of the remaining failures?
In a complex and innovative world, any organisation should expect failures as well as successes. When Google developed their OKR approach, they considered the “sweet spot” to be achieving 70% of objectives. Not 100%, indeed 100% success rate was an indication of a problem. No organisation can succeed simply by performing repeatable, predictable tasks, especially in an innovative environment.
If someone consistently fully attains their objectives, their OKRs aren’t ambitious enough and they need to think bigger
Google re:Work
How then should we respond to failures? Should we, as seems inevitable in the “Scientific Management” approach, conceal them in a quest for personal advancement? Successful organisations argue for the opposite. We should make our failures as visible as possible in order to learn from them.
Only by seeing, analysing and discussing failures can we learn, grow and develop. This applies both to us as individuals and collectively as a team or an organisation.
If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
An Agile culture needs to ensure that failures are shared and visible. Agility relies on experimentation and adaptation. “Fail fast” is a widely used phrase to reflect the need to identify which outcomes fail and to adapt as swiftly and at as low cost as possible.
Correction or Improvement?
If we are to accept and expect that issues (setbacks, failures, whatever we call them) will occur, we need to consider how to respond to these. The natural feeling is that “agility” requires a rapid response. We experiment, we hit a problem, we fix the problem or pivot away.
Move fast and break things
internal motto used by Facebook until 2014
The reality is that there is more needed than simply fixing the immediate problem and moving on. This is a lesson which arguably led to Facebook abandoning their “Move fast and break things” motto.
When an organisation is a startup, the focus is on managing the present. There seem to be an endless stream of crises and leaders naturally focus on fixing each issue as it occurs. There is often little time to draw breath before the next crisis occurs.
The focus here is on what is known as “corrective action” – the activity needed to fix the specific observed problem. Leaders are often excellent leaders in a crises and steer the organisation through a continual sequence of crises. As I have observed, this can become self-sustaining. If the organisation expects crises, it plans for them. The leaders know how to manage crises so they spend their time doing this rather than avoiding them. Crisis managers unintentionally become crisis creators.
The other side of the coin from “corrective action” is “preventative measures”. As well as ensuring todays issue is resolved, a leader needs to reduce the number of issues occurring. This means that the leader needs to push teams to use techniques such as retrospectives in order to learn from issues. Most critically, to reduce the likelihood of future occurrences.
Failures are identified not to give an opportunity for heroics but for learning.
In order to push from corrective action to preventative measures we need to invest time in understanding the issue and how to prevent it in future. A separate Play on Root Cause Analysis will examine techniques for this.
Good Practices
We have identified three main areas where an Agile leader needs to focus attention in order to maximise the learning from failure.
Firstly, we need to build a culture which accepts that failures occur. We are challenging our teams, and the work is complex. Therefore success and failure do not correlate with good and bad performance. We want our best people to take the big risks, and that means they will fail sometimes. A culture of openness about what is happening will prevent success being based on people’s manipulation of the facts.
It is hard enough to build a culture which accepts failure. However, we need to push this further so that failures are openly discussed and we learn from every failure. Agility is built on experimentation, which means acceptance, even celebration of failure and, most critically, what we learn from it. In one article, Corporate Rebels discuss Clarasys – an employee owned management consultancy firm. The feedback culture in that organisation is so strong that people nominate themselves for a monthly ‘F*ck up championship’ to share to the whole company what they learned from a recent mistake.
Finally you, as a leader, need to think about your approach to heroics. It is great to solve a crisis, and we should celebrate this. But it is even better to learn from that crisis and prevent it recurring. Do you take the time to learn from each crisis? Do you reward not only the visible “heroes” but also the less visible “improvers”? A crisis averted is rarely as visible as a crisis solved.
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