Winning… by Failing?

How adopting a fail fast, fail often, fail smarter approach can lead to success in innovation and transformation

“Failure is Awesome; I love to Fail!”

said no one EVER!

When we think of failure it conjures up a range of emotions from inadequacy, worthlessness to why try as I am never going to succeed. This type of self-critical talk is not right for anyone and do you know what, everyone fails (more often than we realise).

It is easy to look around and see examples of failures and below are a few images of ones ranging from simple spelling mistakes.

To sending mixed messages to those to are trying to get into a building

To my favourite of these being a case of mistaken identity when a well-known brand expands its product offerings (I am not sure about you but when I see this I picture a toothbrush with a dab of Lasagna on it)

What does Failure mean to you?

Before we list some common reasons, I want to point out that there is a difference between feeling like a failure and failing at something. We will cover some of the most common opinions and beliefs about failure.

• No common sense
• Stupidity
• Bad decisions and judgement
• Lack of thinking
• Idiocy
• Lack of Intelligence

The above reasons come from your interpretation of who you are and the transference of these onto others when they fail. Failing is just failing and a healthy and unavoidable part of our everyday life. No one is immune!

At an organisational level, I have been to many companies and met individuals who continuously say “we’ve never failed, we don’t know how to fail”, and this attitude will blindside them and the organisation every time.

Learning Fast from Fail Fast

At an organisational level, seven principles need to exist as part of the culture:

1. Celebrate the Learning Process - We only master skills by learning what works and doesn’t work. A perfect example of this is to watch children when they are beginning to learn to walk. They don’t just decide one day that they are going to walk and master it, they stumble, fall, bump into things and each time make small adjustments, get some help from their parents and before long they are walking around independently.

2. Create a Culture of Trust and Respect - Everyone needs to feel safe and secure and if we are to indeed find the next major breakthrough or make significant changes in the organisation, then we need to be in a culture that trusts that we are doing right by the organisation and that they respect us to be there for us.

3. Have a Fast Mourning Curve - As stated earlier, failure is inevitable and when we encounter this in our organisation we should review what happened, extract the lessons learnt and then move on. We can’t continually dwell in the past and nor can we continue to hold this over the heads of those involved.

4. Accept Failure, Forgive, Don’t Forget - This is important as failure will happen, but we also don’t want to forget the lessons learnt from the past and keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

5. Move fast and break things - This principle comes from Facebook and whilst I agree that we need to put more emphasis on action, this is dependant on the stage of the organisation and the nature of our business. This needs to be adapted based for our organisation but the principle itself is essential as we look around markets are being continuously disrupted and it would be better if we internally disrupted our business and industry before the competition does.

6. Be Accountable! - This principle is near and dear to my heart as at the end of the day if you are given the opportunity and something goes wrong, you need to take accountability for it, fix it.

7. Persistence - “Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential” - Winston Churchill

How do I…

When you look at the above the first thing that should pop into your mind is that these are all common sense and we do it anyway. I completely understand this mindset as who would say that they have a culture that doesn’t embrace respect, trust and learning?

What we say and think versus what we do is often not aligned or people within our organisations at middle levels of management aren’t living by these values and principles.

To get around this and what has been successful for me in the past is to focus on 2 or 3 of the above principles as linchpins to change and then once we get some traction the rest will fall into line. The ones that I focus on initially are the following in order and some steps to implement them in your organisation:

• Create a Culture of Trust and Respect - For any change to be implemented there has be a feeling of safety and whilst I am sure there are people saying I can’t control the culture of the company you are correct, but you can control this within your team and your sphere of influence. If you are a team leader then by providing an environment that as the leader you pass credit to your team and if things go wrong you shield them and you take accountability when it goes wrong then your team will see that you have their backs and this builds trust.

• Celebrate the Learning Process - This is achieved by giving people an opportunity to take on tasks that are outside their comfort zone and getting them to relook at how things are currently working by challenging them to find ways to improve the process.

• Accept Failure, Forgive, Don’t Forget - This is the next logical step to the previous point because as soon as you challenge people to take on new skills it is inevitable that failure will occur. This is the most important thing in that when things go wrong, and they will that you remain calm, provide them with the opportunity to correct this and use it as part of learning development to get them comfortable with making changes and failure. One of the things that I like to do is to host a “Failure Party” and get everyone together in a relaxed environment. We then discuss the changes that have been made in a non-judgemental manner without identifying staff to celebrate what didn’t go to plan and how this ultimately leads to overall success.

I have had the opportunity to apply these principles many times in my career and I like to take a slightly different approach in that I don’t refer to it as failures, but merely as learnings. The reason for doing so is to circumvent the perception that the word failure has in many cultures, but still applying all the above principles and approach.

I have found that when we call it “learnings” you can then come up with a hypothesis on how to solve a problem such as “How do we reduce Customer Interactions by x%?” When you do this you are able to come up with a number of possible reasons and try these in a controlled manner to prove or disprove that they work.

There is a belief that we make a decision and then execute and we get the final result. This is a false belief as no single decision or approach just works out of the box. There are many decisions in between and many of these are wrong, but if we have a way to measure and track then we can course-correct quickly as part of a fast iterative cycle.

The Upside of Failure

The following are some results that were achieved in just one quarter by applying the above principles for Australian Operations of a company in the Telecommunications industry:

• 94.8% reduction in Call Volume

• 61.63% reduction in the cost for Inbound Call Charges

• 50.11% Improvement in Voice Average Speed to Answer

• 35.71 increase in Number of Chat Interactions

• 47.98% reduction in Cost to Serve

• 31./71% reduction in Operations Staff

Wrapping Up

Failure is part of life, we all fail and there is no getting around it. The most successful people are also those to have experienced the most failure and what makes them different is a single realisation which is a failure and feeling like a failure aren’t intertwined.

Failure is temporary and it only becomes permanent if you don’t do anything about it!