Failure has historically been viewed as a negative thing, but in recent times it’s taken on a much more benign hue, as entrepreneurs have taken to regarding failure as an inevitable part of pushing the limits of what is achievable.
For instance, Finnish research found that the ability to learn from failure is crucial for startups to grow, but that for failure to have these benefits requires a conscious process whereby the lessons from each failure are processed and learned from. Interestingly, the researchers found that it’s not necessary for the failure to be experienced personally for benefits to be gleaned, as similar gains can be obtained from learning from other people’s failures too.
Learning from our mistakes
Getting this process right is crucial if failure is to be beneficial rather than normalising mistakes. That’s the finding from recent research from Kellogg, which found that often leaders can exaggerate the benefits of failure, which can result in employees becoming demotivated.
The researchers found that it’s common for leaders to overestimate the chances of bouncing back from a failure and succeeding the second time. This inaccurate portrayal of our chances is largely because we overestimate people’s ability to learn from their mistakes. In reality, people often struggle to really dive into their failures to understand what went wrong and how things can be better next time.
This was clearly evident in research from Rutgers, which found that experts are often the worst of learning from their mistakes, and instead double down on the things they did wrong. This is because they perceive any criticism as an attack on their ability and even their identity. As such, they often prefer to place the blame on external sources.
“When you tell experts that they’re wrong, it matters where that ‘You’re wrong’ is coming from,” the researchers say. “If an inexperienced group of novices say, ‘You’re wrong,’ then it’s not very threatening to the identity of the expert. But if an expert says, ‘You’re wrong,’ then the criticized experts often feel their identity as an expert is threatened.”
Talking about failure
They argue that when we talk about failure, we tend to try and do a few things, including cleansing ourselves of the pain associated with the failure; managing the impression others have of us after the failure; and only then, sharing any learnings we may have from the experience.
This matters when it comes to digital transformation, as the chances of failure are pretty high. Indeed, data from McKinsey suggests up to 80% of digital transformation projects fail to achieve their goals.
Research from City Business School found that one of the core strategies for success with digital transformation was to innovate via continuous experimentation. Obviously for this approach to succeed requires companies and leaders to learn from each experiment.
They also found that as well as talking about failure in the right way, companies deployed a portfolio approach that allowed them to be more experimental as they also had projects that were more mature and less risky to fall back on.
No silver bullet
The key takeaway from these studies is that failure can indeed be hugely powerful in helping us to improve, both individually and collectively, but this should by no means be taken for granted or assumed will be the outcome.
As the Kellogg team reminds us, the very act of overestimating how likely we are to improve the second time around can harm our chances of doing so. Indeed, they found that we expect around 60% of people to succeed after failing initially, when the real figure is just 35%. The researchers found that this excessive optimism cuts to the heart of how we perceive failure itself.
They found that when participants were told a score was classed as a failure, they were more likely to believe they’d improve the second time compared to those who were told the score in a neutral way. This is likely to be precisely because of the difficulties outlined by the Rutgers researchers that make it so hard for us to attend to our own failures. As a result, we tend to view the failures of others as a great learning opportunity, but struggle to apply the same thinking when faced with our own failures.
The researchers use the instances of people who suffer from life threatening diseases who fail to change their lifestyles despite the quite evident wake up call. A good starting point is to be more honest about the true likelihood of lessons being learned. After that, if managers can make owning up to failure more acceptable, especially to highly skilled individuals, we’re much more likely to get an environment whereby lessons are learned and our chances of achieving true digital transformation are enhanced.
