Harvesting the Fruits of Failure
I had a Chemistry professor at Purdue who used to say, “No experiment is ever a failure. It can always serve as a bad example!” I didn’t appreciate his wisdom at the time, but I’ve come to see how failed efforts at change or intelligent risk taking can be more instructive than successes. However, it takes some key factors to derive the benefits.
Following a Failure
These are some of the necessary ingredients to mining the gold from failed efforts:
- Humility and self-awareness
- Candor from those involved when providing feedback
- An inquiring mind more intent on getting at the truth rather than assigning blame
- A disciplined approach to analyzing the failed effort
- A desire to learn and improve
Common Causes of Failures We’ve Witnessed
In our work with organizations pursuing a performance excellence journey, we’ve seen our share of aborted efforts. One of the most common failure modes is a senior leader who gets distracted by the next big shiny object (the latest WSJ or NYT best seller on the business books list; or the latest management fad – remember when Six Sigma was all the rage?). Or there has been an unrealistic expectation about how quickly they could win an award. Or an underestimate of the real work that would be required to implement systematic processes and build a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
And sometimes change fails because the change wasn’t a real improvement; it was merely different from the previous state. This is often the result of inadequate attention to getting customer and stakeholder input and then soliciting their feedback during a pilot phase of the change. Sometimes it’s the result of a flawed design process, where requirements and expectations were known but not embedded in the new process, product, or service due to arrogance, ignorance, or – sadly – incompetence.
Analyzing Failed Efforts to Harvest the Learnings
I’m not a fan of the oft-used “Plus/Delta” brainstorming technique (what went well/what needs to be changed) following an event. It fails to do a real root cause analysis, often scratches just a superficial surface, and doesn’t drive concrete action plans to prevent the failure mode(s) in the future.
When I was the Chair of one of the Alliance Programs, I also facilitated our examiner training. Following a nearly disastrous training event when the area was hit with a major blizzard, we conducted a structured After Action Review (AAR), a debriefing and learning methodology developed by the US Army.
https://hbr.org/2023/01/a-better-approach-to-after-action-reviewsWe assembled a team of all of the key participants in the process and began by breaking the examiner training and the application process into phases: Examiner Recruitment, Training Logistics, Examiner Training, Independent Analysis and Consensus, Site Visit, and Judges Review. For each phase, we identified what was supposed to happen, what actually did happen, the reason(s) for any discrepancies, and detailed action plans to address the gaps before the next cycle.
It was incredibly successful in improving the subsequent examiner training cycles so long as we stayed disciplined in adhering to the improvements we had implemented. But over time as the key participants changed, we found that there wasn’t sufficient knowledge management to hold the gains, so the new team conducted another After Action Review.
Holding the Gains
If you’re going to leverage the learnings from a failure, you need to memorialize them in documentation that can survive changes in the organization. Often times this is managed with policies, procedures, checklists, and training. But these have to be easily retrievable in a knowledge management system for future use. Some of our clients use shared drives accessible by their employees; others use sophisticated systems for document control. The real message is that these lessons learned do nothing to improve organizational maturity if they aren’t captured, stored, and reviewed.
