Have you made it safe to fail?
Learning and failing go hand in hand, but unless people feel safe, they won’t take chances.
When Thomas Edison was asked if he regretted all his failed tests on light bulbs, he famously responded, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Most people find it hard to be quite so sanguine as Mr. Edison about failure. It goes against human nature.
Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar, explains the psychology: “One of the things about failure is that it’s asymmetrical with respect to time. When you look back and see failure, you say, ‘It made me what I am!’ But looking forward, you think, ‘I don’t know what is going to happen, and I don’t want to fail.’ The difficulty is that when you’re running an experiment, it’s forward-looking. We have to try extra hard to make it safe to fail.”1
Making it safe to fail is crucial because learning happens through experimentation, and experimentation often results in failure. Recent McKinsey research shows, in fact, that respondents at successful organizations are more than twice as likely as their peers elsewhere to strongly agree that employees are rewarded for taking risks of an appropriate level.2 So a willingness to fail has to be embedded in a company’s culture. Many companies have gotten good at saying that it’s safe to fail, but for most people that’s not enough. Human nature being what it is, risk aversion (even fear) will rule people’s actions if they don’t actually believe it’s safe to fail.
At one telecom company, for example, a team working with an outside vendor passed what it felt was a tricky decision to its manager, who referred it all the way to the CEO’s desk. The CEO then called the CEO of the vendor to try to resolve the issue. This game of “pass the buck” happened four times as lower-level teams and managers were unwilling to make decisions, fearful they might be the wrong ones.
Companies have to put in place various “safety nets” to allow a culture of experimentation to take hold. Here are a few ways we’ve seen companies successfully combat this kind of fear:
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