AE Leadership Letter: Volume 11, Issue 1

LEADERSHIP LAB – New management ideas at work

New Book Touts Virtues of Failure

Fail better

While bookstore shelves teem with business best-sellers chronicling corporate successes, Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson’s new book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, takes a different tack. Edmondson touts the virtues of failures—and how they can often offer more value than successes. “In our lives, and in our organizations, most of us would benefit from experiencing more failures, not fewer,” she argues.

Fail smarter

Edmondson isn’t advocating that companies embrace careless mistakes or preventable accidents—which could have particularly catastrophic consequences for architecture and engineering firms—but rather what she calls “intelligent failures.” According to Edmondson, a failure can be deemed “intelligent” if it occurs in new territory, in pursuit of a goal, if there’s good reason to think what was tried might have worked, and if the experiment was sufficiently small with limited financial, reputational, or safety risks.

Fail comfortably

Edmondson notes that “most successful people in every field have healthy relationships with failure.” Think scientists, elite athletes, or technology innovators. They’re not only comfortable with failing, but with dissecting those failures as well. However, most of us don’t learn as much from our stumbles as we should for four reasons, according to Edmondson. The first is an aversion to closely analyze failures and understand exactly what to do better. The second is a disbelief that people learn more from failures than successes. The third is a tendency to conduct superficial analyses that produces insufficient takeaways such as simply trying harder. The fourth is that embarrassment from sharing failures with entire teams limits those teams’ abilities to learn. 

Fail safer

Only if failures are reported can benefits be obtained. In her prior research, Edmondson had discovered something counterintuitive—the best-performing teams also reported the most errors. That’s because employees knew their corporate cultures wouldn’t penalize them for reporting mistakes. Edmondson says companies need to foster cultures in which it’s psychologically safe to take smart risks and conduct extensive post-mortems after every failure. She advises firms to approach failures with “curiosity and growth” instead of “fear and shame.”