Failure has become increasingly acceptable in recent years as organizations have accepted it’s vital to push the boundaries. There are good and bad ways to fail, and Harvard’s Amy Edmondson explores how to fail intelligently in her recent book Right Kind of Wrong.
She argues that intelligent failure is characterized as:
- Taking place in new territory, as if it’s not new territory then there is probably already a way to solve things that would negate the risk of failure.
- Driven by opportunities, as there needs to be sufficient reward to justify the inherent risk being taken in trying something new.
- Informed by prior knowledge, as it’s important that as much preparation is done to ensure a good chance of success. Accepting failure doesn’t mean accepting poor preparation.
- As small as possible, as, it perhaps goes without saying, the mistake shouldn’t be so grave that it utterly sinks you. It needs to be something you can recover from.
- Something that is learned from, as obviously failure is only valuable if lessons are learned from it and the mistakes aren’t repeated.
While these are all sensible suggestions, it does also feel like they’re suggestions that have been made a number of times over the last few years. I was left feeling a little underwhelmed by a book that was lauded as the business book of the year by the Financial Times.
If it’s your first foray into failure and psychological safety then you will find things of interest, but if this is an area you’ve explored before, there may be little new insights to grab your attention.
