Language Matters When Talking About Innovation and Failure

by Stefan Lindegaard

One of Thomas Alva Edison’s most famous quotes is, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Less often cited is this statement, “I am not discouraged because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward….”

Edison had the mindset of a scientific researcher. As such failure was not part of his lexicon. He was experimenting and because everyone knows experiments fail more often than not, he was not disheartened when yet one more type of material failed to work as the filament in his light bulb. He spent 12 years perfecting the incandescent bulb. Had failure been part of his mindset, perhaps he would not have stuck it out.

Certainly other inventors didn’t. In fact, historians Robert Friedel and...

A CEO Role Model for Smart Failing

by Stefan Lindegaard

It’s very refreshing – and also very rare – to come across a CEO who is willing to talk about his company’s failures in public in a forthright manner. Most would rather just forget about flops and move on without ever publicly acknowledging the failure, never mind the reasons why things didn’t turn out as hoped. Some, when pressed, give disingenuous responses, such as “The market just wasn’t ready yet for our great new thing” – implying that it is those stupid consumers’ fault for not recognizing a genius idea when they see it.

That’s why I found this article, entitled “Identify and Learn from Mistakes,” by Richard Branson, head of Virgin Group, so refreshing. Branson writes candidly about two new product initiatives that...

Does Your Incentive Program Reward Results or Behaviors?

by Stefan Lindegaard

Who gets rewarded for innovating in your organization? Is it only those teams that manage to successfully carry an idea all the way through to a lucrative reality? What happens to teams that tackle an idea only to establish early on that it won’t work? Are they chastised for their failure or do they also get some positive recognition when they come away with valuable lessons that will help them (and other teams) do better next time around?

As Innosight Ventures’ Scott Anthony noted in this blog post, “getting world-class at innovation requires moving beyond rewarding results to rewarding behaviors.” When you reward only positive outcomes, people quickly learn to become risk-averse. By only rewarding success, you are apt to end...

Don’t Encourage Failure or Mistakes

by Stefan Lindegaard

This morning, I got an e-mail from Report 103 with their newsletter on applied creativity, imagination, ideas and innovation in business.

It is often a good read and I definitely liked the topic they had chosen this time. It was Glorious Mistakes and it looked into how companies deal with mistakes.

I liked most of the stuff in the newsletter, but I definitely disagreed with this statement:

“There is no doubt about it, mistakes are proven learning exercises. So much so that managers should sometimes encourage mistakes, especially during the early learning phase of new employees. When people make mistakes, when projects go wrong, when teams screw up, their errors should not be swept under the corporate carpet and forgotten. Rather, they should...

Open Discussion: What Are the Criteria for Failure?

by Stefan Lindegaard

I like how Wikipedia describes how the “criteria for failure are heavily dependent on context of use, and may be relative to a particular observer or belief system. A situation considered to be a failure by one might be considered a success by another, particularly in cases of direct competition or a zero-sum game.

Similarly, the degree of success or failure in a situation may be differently viewed by distinct observers or participants, such that a situation that one considers to be a failure, another might consider to be a success, a qualified success or a neutral situation.

It may also be difficult or impossible to ascertain whether a situation meets criteria for failure or success due to ambiguous or ill-defined definition of those criteria....

The Key Types of Failure in Organizations

by Stefan Lindegaard

What are the key types of failures that organizations experience?

It would be great to have a discussion on this and I can start by suggesting that failure in organizations most often happen on two levels: the failure to anticipate and the failure to execute.

I can continue by arguing that failure to anticipate happens on three levels:

• Organizations fail to anticipate changes in the market.

• Organizations fail to anticipate changes that impact the platforms needed to bring their products and services to market. This includes the failure to build proper ecosystems.

• Organizations fail to anticipate changes that will have an impact on their organizational setup and the culture.

My focus on this is very much about changes. Here it is important to notice that...

Experiments, Accidents, Failures that Lead to Innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

I stumbled over a great blog post on Gizmodo Eureka Innovation that looks into how experiments, accidents and failures can lead to innovation.

You can find two examples below.

4. Play-Doh – Kutol Products

Before being found ground into the rugs of child-rearing homes everywhere, Play-Doh was ironically created to be a cleaning product. The paste was first marketed as a treatment for filthy wallpaper—before the company that produced it began to go down the tubes.

The discovery that saved Kutol Products—headed for bankruptcy—wasn’t that their wall cleaner worked particularly well, but that schoolchildren were beginning to use it to create Christmas ornaments as arts and crafts projects. By removing the compound’s cleanser and adding colors and a fresh scent, Kutol spun their wallpaper...

Open Discussion: What Organizational Practices, Values Hinder Learning from Failures?

by Stefan Lindegaard

Most organizations do not have a process in place to evaluate failure and less so on how to extract learning from failure.

I am curious to learn more about corporate practices and cultural values that can lead to the learning power of failures being overlooked.

Some examples could be quality programs that go too far on the expense of innovation and creativity, rigid focus on metrics rather than outcomes or management approaches that simply do not tolerate failure.

Can you share some insights, experiences or cases on this topic?

Promote Failure, Fail Forward

by Stefan Lindegaard

I really liked the inspiration of promoting failure and failing forward as introduced by G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Viton in their article, The CEO’s Innovation Nightmare.

The snippets:

Promote failure. Entrepreneurs understand that each small failure brings them closer to the solution. So find ways to demand lots of baby-step failures that promote learning and create a culture of action. This will get you to the finish line and keep fear of failure from locking up your innovation engine.

Fail forward. Get into the habit of creating many experiments and celebrating the learning. For example: “In this experiment we learned that people did not understand our offer.” “In this experiment we learned we were charging too much.” And “in this experiment...

Calling Great Minds – Can We Learn from Failure?

by Stefan Lindegaard

I wrote a blog post some months ago, Smartfailing.com – a concept for learning through failure.

The many comments and the discussions it created on LinkedIn confirmed my belief that I am not the only one who believes that we can become better at learning from our failures.

My experiences from that post has led to SmartFailing, a new blog and a project for which the purpose is to become better at learning from failure by starting discussions, sharing examples and providing inspiration on how failure can lead to innovation success – and beyond.

This project is work in progress and it is a co-creation process with many others interested in how we can become better at learning from failure.

Will you join...