Smartfailing – a concept for learning through failure
We need to become better at learning through failure, but the word failure itself is so negatively loaded. How can we create a new concept and vocabulary on the intersection of failure and learning?
This is my input based on my early thoughts and great input from Twitter conversations (#failsourcing):
Smartfailing – a new concept for learning through failure
Failsourcing – the process in which you learn from your own and others failures
Fail Capital – the learning you extract from failsourcing
Return on Failure – the ratio of the actions you take and investments you make once you know your fail capital
The key element is to learn from failure. Your input is highly appreciated. For your inspiration, the Twitter conversation spurred great comments including these:
Hutch Carpenter @bhc3
‘Failsourcing’ – it has a tinge of wallowing in failure. But I like the underlying concept. ‘Smartfailing’?
Note: I like the term of smartfailing and I think this is a better title for the concept itself. Thanks Hutch!
Dave Hoffman @dhoff25
Each failure brings u a step closer to success. Using others fail-lessons=exponentially efficient.
Ryan Tracey @ryantracey
Western society should view failure more in terms of #failsourcing – less in terms of embarrassment.
Sounds like sourcing bad ideas from the crowd. How about fail capital?
Note: I like the term fail capital as the outcome of failsourcing. Ryan, thanks for the contribution!
Nello Spiteri @EnEsTweet
key is to set up the right processes to learn from failures and share learnings across divisions/company.
Graham Hill @GrahamHill
Failure is still failure. It is much less preferable to success. Let’s not start to idolise dumb failure (which much failure is)
To plan to fail is foolish. Plan to learn. That’s not failure, but investment. Safe Fail Probes http://tinyurl.com/dj8u7n
My response to Graham’s valid comments:
No one should plan to fail. But it happens n then you should learn from failures. Learning through failure becomes an investment.
Arie Goldshlager @ariegoldshlager
Failure is a great Learning Center… Success only confirms what you already know
Rob Jacobs @eduinnovation
I like idea of failures as ave. for learning. It’s not wrong, it’s just the right answer to a diff question.
You can find even more on Twitter by checking #failsourcing. You can also follow my tweets on @lindegaard
It would be great to hear your comments and reflections on this so let’s continue the discussion here. Please also let me know if you can suggest great reads on the intersection of failure and learning.
Stefan,
Thanks for starting this important conversation.
I would like to offer the following observations to help frame the conversation:
1) First and foremost we certainly need to design the innovation process to produce successes and not failures. However innovation failures will continue to prove both inevitable and pervasive.
2) We therefore need to design the innovation process to produce a conclusive success or failure early to reduce the prospective failure cost.
3) Finally, we certainly need to view every failure as a great learning opportunity.
Thanks,
Arie Goldshlager
@ariegoldshlager
Terrific discussion…I like the idea of an ROF (Return on Failure) which will definitely be hard to quantify but can get people thinking in a different way; view failure as an asset – need to think this through more of course…
Some good quotes on “failure.” Thanks for igniting this important exchange.
http://tinyurl.com/7wanxw
Mitch
PS: I love ROF (“return on failure”)
Not seeking to wordsmith here, but perhaps the concept should be to seek to drive success by learning from both past successes and failures. In that vein, perhaps “Smartsourcing” is a worthwhile concept. To Hutch’s point, it doesn’t dwell on failure, but recognizes that failure is a valid source of inspiration (not just successes)..
Michael,
I actually like the term smartsourcing but it is already well used having several other meanings. It gets 139,000 Google hits. I am working further with terms such as Smartfailing, failsourcing, Fail capital and Return of Fail Capital. Let’s see where this takes us.
Deb, good point on Return on Failure. I have included this term. See above.
This is a good conversation that, like many of the cultural elements that are stumbling blocks to understanding and progressing innovation and collaboration, is not talked about enough by practitioners let alone by organizational leaders.
I speak to my clients and partners (understanding that we only focus on the broad public sector as our marketplace so this might be the wrong lens for some) about the “fail value” of any given innovation or collaboration initiative. As Graham has suggested, you don’t promote failure, but it would also be silly to certainly not learn from it in any situation. I think in certain situations, particularly, for pilots/lab type engagements, you have to be even more aware and ideally be planning to learn from any points of failure in the pilot.
However, learning from failure from a project standpoint is a pretty usual, good fundamental to have in place. From that perspective, it certainly makes sense to carry it over to innovation initiatives. Where I would fully agree with Graham, and perhaps go against the tide, is that I would not actively try to “shoot for” failure in an initiative as an objective which, with the definitions suggested above, is what I would be led to believe.
Beyond absorbing lessons from aspects of (or in some cases entire projects) failing in an initiative, I think – at least in the public sector – a pertinent question to chat about are strategies to help leadership understand and be somewhat comfortable with the prospect of initiatives that may have higher risks that what they are use to (ergo more potential points of failure). Certainly from a day to day viewpoint and really from all aspects, the culture and governance of the public sector remains “uncomfortable” with the new collaboration born from social media, and unsure and/or fearful and/or uninterested in bringing it into mainstream public sector. Well constructed innovation and collaboration projects – designed to succeed but with a higher chance of failure – could help to build the bridge in earnest, demonstrate value of cultural change, business value, etc. To me, having a discussion around strategies for leaders to accept to take on those projects, to help them justify it to taxpayers, to help them sell and engage stakeholders in earnest…that would be really helpful to a lot of people.
In a nutshell, “how do we help leaders understand and sell the benefits of higher risk and potential failure to advance innovation and collaboration”.
Throwing additional word stimulus into the mix, “post mortem” and “autopsy” are procedures intended to learn the cause of death. They can seek to parlay this learning into how to prevent future similar occurrences (e.g recognizing contributing factors). To the extent that we view businesses as “living things”, there may be something to this concept. At any rate, more to chew on…
I never trust anyone who tells me they never make mistakes, because the best way to learn is from making mistakes.
Your smartfailing, failsourcing and fail capital terms are clever, but unnecessary.
Since you admit “failure” has an inherently negative connotation, you can avoid any constructions that include the taint of “fail” (as your three neologisms do) by simply using the existing term for “learning from failure”–Experience.
Steven, I saw your very short comment on LinkedIn and I liked it a lot. Failure does in many equal experience, but we still need to look further into the process of turning failure into experience. Too much is lost in this process – or by the lack of one.
I strongly support the use of existing terms over new ones, but “experience” is much broader than just learning from failure. It also includes learning from success, and learning from outcomes that are neither success nor failure. So to me, a term that captures learning from failure specifically is fair.
[...] second point is that failing is part of the innovation process. Stefan Lindegaard has recently triggered a discussion on this topic, which as usual has elicited mixed responses. Some say that it is better to succeed than fail, and [...]
Fun and fine post Stefan!
I always like to cheat when playing 1P shoot-ups like Quake: not try to finish it with as little lives lost as possible, but just in the shortest time possible – and then play it again once more
So I’ll die often, restart the game at the same point, save where I died last, and on goes the show: you can compare it with setting savepoints in a database transaction, where finishing the game would be the final “commit”
So, I don’t try to die as much as possible, but it’s an accepted risk – in that way, I don’t really fail when I do die, but rather I succeed; because I’ve become yet closer to my goal
Having said that, what would then be a good word?
I like all the propositions, but not the word fail itself. It’s not a real success either. Fail comes from Latin ‘fallere’ which means “deceive, be lacking or defective”
I see analogies with a Pyrrhic victory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory and the final goal being to win the battle.
Under normal circumstances, one cannot endure the losses suffered by the battles that are won at such great expense that they should (“should”) be considered a defeat rather than a victory
However, the very trick of the Pyrrhic comparison was the fact that he lost less soldiers than the Romans; the Romans on the other hand could very quickly and easily re-supply their armies (with even angrier soldiers!). I see a link with social media where opinions and ideas come and die quickly and easily, so actually, Pyrrhus would never lose now!
So, I propose these:
SmartPyrrhicking
Pyrrhicsourcing
Pyrrhic Capital
Return on Pyrrhicking
I added the k for grammatical purposes
Great post, Stefan – and a great follow-up discussion!
Probably totally irrelevant … but I can’t resist this quote
‘She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all’
Bob Dylan – Love Minus Zero/No Limit
Stefan, I think we need to step back for a moment. Anybody with innovation experience knows that projects fail. Yes, we should use that word. Anybody with successful products on the market also knows that if all your projects succeed, they will probably all be incremental and you’re not trying hard enough.
The conclusion is that your innovation PORTFOLIO RETURN is the key, just like any investment portfolio. You learn from the projects that fail to increase the proportion of projects that succeed, and to increase your return on investment.
So if we want to introduce the learning concept, how about PORTFOLIO LEARNING, using the experience of your portfolio of innovation projects to learn for the future. It also reduces the negative aspects of using failure as a word, because we should not shy away from using it. It happens, let’s not deny it, but learn from it and don’t repeat the reasons for failure. instead, fail fast, fail small, and learn from it.
All of these are interesting points. In my mind, you want to stay as close as possible to the true objectives of the excercise, so the wording should convey what you are trying to do. Too cute, and it loses meaning. Too vague, and it won’t stick.
“Return on Failure” is interesting because it inherently removes the negative connotation or “failure” while simultaneously indicating that there may in fact be a potential upside. And, if the learnings translated directly into an alternative offering, the model probably wouldn’t be too hard to develop at a project level. If not (which may often be the case) I like the portfolio approach of Kevin.
All of these are interesting points. In my mind, you want to stay as close as possible to the true objectives of the excercise, so the wording should convey what you are trying to do. Too cute, and it loses meaning. Too vague, and it won’t stick.
“Return on Failure” is interesting because it inherently removes the negative connotation of “failure” while simultaneously indicating the benefit of potential upside. And, if the learnings translate directly into an alternative offering, the model probably wouldn’t be too hard to attribute to a project level. If not (which may often be the case) I like the portfolio approach of Kevin.
Very interesting thread here. I personally like the notion of “smartfailing” and would disagree with Stefan one point. I would strongly assert that planning to fail is a critical and desirable component in any innovation process. Not only does this help support the inclusion of tools and processes to capture the learnings and value from “failure” right from the start, it is generally a sign of a poor process of innovation if efforts do not lead repeatedly to failure.
More often than not, true breakthrough innovation occurs by understanding and harvesting the outcome of these failures (e.g., electric light bulb, Post-it Notes, White-out). If you’re not repeatedly failing, then you’re probably not trying hard enough or thinking far enough “outside of the box”!
The problem is that senior management in companies whose culture is not inherently innovative (i.e., 95% of the companies out there) are not geared towards accepting failure as a desirable outcome or know how to capture the highly valuable lessons that each “failure” creates. Instead, they tend to fire or demote the truly innovative thinkers in their organizations (if they have any at all) and hire and promote individuals whose greatest core competencies are “working the system” and playing the right internal political games to advance their own careers – often to the detriment of the company and its shareholders.
[...] ideas that don’t work. Stefan Lindegaard had some interesting discussions last month around the concept of smartfailing – which is built on the idea that you can systematically learn from ideas that don’t [...]