Hi folks,
For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a bathroom remodel in my house. Which is about as awesome as it sounds. I’ve (re)discovered that I’m good at the demolition part, but I don’t really enjoy the whole “put things back together in a functional way” part. But, it’s been a learning experience.
Beyond simply relearning my shortcomings as a general contractor, I’ve picked up a few lessons along the way. Today I want to share the first lesson: there’s value in failing and failing fast.
My house was built in 1939 and has some unconventional (read: not nearly to modern code) “features” sprinkled throughout. Which means I had to come up with some creative solutions – one of which was stuccoing the basement walls with concrete. And while that solved one problem – the tight space tolerances – it also ended up looking like crap. So I’m now chiseling 200 pounds of concrete off my walls.
Unfortunately, yes in my house. But for as much as I wish I had made the right decision in the first place, I’m glad I declared the stucco a failure and took a different course. Because living with my bad decision for years to come would have been far worse than stopping, changing direction, and correcting this early in the process.
Comfort with failure is a modern theme in business as well. Countless articles and books extol the virtues of failure – but only under certain circumstances. You need to be well positioned to extract value from failures in order to make them worthwhile. In 2011, Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School outlined three activities through which an organization can learn from failure: detection, analysis, and experimentation. Years of research went into her conclusions, but at their core, they’re pretty simple:
- You need to look for failures, both large and small, both stand-alone and aggregate.
- When you find them, you need to consciously analyze them, uncovering the underlying root causes.
- Finally, try to produce failures through experimentation when appropriate and culturally embrace the inevitability of failure.
Within my team at work, we do some of this well, but we have ample room for improvement. While I think/hope we have a culture that doesn’t blame the messenger and, thus, encourages the identification of failures when they happen, we don’t perform any real analysis of failures nor do we frequently set up experiments where failure is a likely outcome. If we’re going to get the most value out of our failings, these are things we should do better. So, we’re going to experiment a bit more, but also prepare to sink some time into examining our inevitable failures. If nothing else, all our new failures will give us good stories for years to come!
Rex