Why Does An Organizational Culture That Celebrates Failure Helps Foster Innovation?

In this article, we will discuss why it is important to build an organizational culture that celebrates failure. Why failure, in general, is important for the personal well-being and mental health of your employees. What is failure intolerance? How failure intolerance can harm your employees? How to improve employee tolerance of failure. Finally, we will provide an actionable 10-step measure for improving your employee wellbeing.

Why Celebrating Failure in The Organization is In Talks Today?

Most organizations in the age of growth want the best of the market share. They expect their employees to work 24×7 and bring them the success that no other competitor has. Failures are unacceptable. There is no scope for taking risks and therefore, any new idea is dumped. Employees are rarely passionate about what they do because they are too concerned to keep their job by doing what they are told to do.

This leads to severe work pressure, anxiety, and emotional dysregulation. This not only affects the mental health of the employees but also the interpersonal dynamics within the team.

Modern business is not only about revenue, but much about innovation and staying ahead in the competition. A culture that doesn’t nourish failures, fresh ideas, and new projects would eventually be put behind by the competitors. The employees would also leave early.

Mark H. McCormack About Celebrating Failure Within Organization

Mark H. McCormack was a famous businessman, a lawyer, and a sports agent. He was into the business of promoting world-renowned players, their public relations, advertising, image, and so on.

He was also the author of the best-selling book “What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School”.

One day while reading through the files of his managers, McCormack received a phone call from an industrialist friend. He told him that, he was searching for the failures in his managers in order to promote them. His friend was uttered surprised and asked for the reason.

Answering the question, McCormack said, “I pay for success, but I see their failure for promotion.”
He further went on to explain – “promotion only if he fails at least three times a year. Failure means he has tried something new, failed, but has courageously moved on, not despairing, trying for a new initiative. Such managers are what I want”.
Friend asked, “then efficiency”?

“Machines are more efficient than humans. But human characteristics are his spirit, courage, new things to do, and even fighting in an adverse environment. Today, my company is spread all over the world as such managers are always chosen.”

McCormack

Power of Failed Attempts

When Lions hunt, nearly 70% of the time, they fail to get their prey. They still try. Ethologists, who observe animal behavior in their natural habitat claim that repeated effort in trying to achieve something and failing makes an animal mentally tougher. They don’t get frustrated. Besides, their brain and body are habituated to the practice of attempting.

Every time you attempt something and you fail, you learn something about what doesn’t work. Next time, you won’t make the same mistakes. If you fail again the next time, you will again learn new insights.

Legend says that Edison failed 1000 times while trying to make an electrical bulb. He went on to say later that “I did not fail 1000 times, rather I learned 1000 different ways an electrical bulb can’t work”.

Even Sherpa Tenzing had nearly ten failed attempts before he could actually reach the top of Everest.

Legendary cricketer Sachin Tendulkar had to wait for 22 years, before getting his dream World cup in 2011.

In Silicon Valley, founders who have failed in past ventures are quite respected and are quite preferred by the investors. Silicon Valley investors say that it is irrelevant that a founder has failed because almost 90% do not try in the first place. A failed founder simply means that the founder is amongst the top 10% of the people who try. Once someone tries enough, one would eventually be successful.

Elon Musk’s Space X is today a trendsetting space company. However, the hallmark of SpaceX has been the sheer number of failed launches they suffered. In fact, Elon Musk nearly had to lose his home to support SpaceX.

Frustration Intolerance

Frustration intolerance beliefs are hypothesized by rational–emotive behaviour therapy (REBT) to form one of two major categories of psychological disturbance, along with those referring to self-worth.

Harrington^​1​

It is an established fact that the least one tries, the less tolerant one is of failures. This is a psychological condition leading to severe mental and emotional issues. Therefore the more power of failed attempt rule is used, the more tolerant one would become to setbacks and failure, and thus will have less frustration.

Frustration Intolerance in An Organization

Any business will have setbacks. For instance, a tweet from a celebrity almost leads to the end of one of the top Indian e-commerce companies Snapdeal. When an organization has not attempted different things and has failed, the frustration intolerance may very well have a ripple effect in the organization and may lead to the collapse of a business unit.

Google has solved this challenge by allowing its employees to work on their favorite projects during office hours. This not only has turned Google into one of the biggest brands of the century but also at the same time has gifted us several great projects like Gmail. Hence an organizational structure that celebrates failure would foster innovation.

Behavioral Self-Regulation

Miller and Brown formulated a seven-step model of self-regulation model^​2​.

According to the model, behavioral self-regulation may falter if one fails in any of the following seven steps.

1. Receiving relevant information
2. Evaluating the information and comparing it to norms
3. Triggering change
4. Searching for options
5. Formulating a plan
6. Implementing the plan
7. Assessing the plan’s effectiveness

Implementation of a plan, and triggering a change, in particular, affect the overall self-regulation of an employee in your organization. If your organization’s overall employee mental health is to be considered, then failure tolerance in all the above metrics would become important.

How to Create an Organization Culture that Celebrates Failure, and Use the Culture for Innovation?

1. Create small projects within the organization like a small startup.
2. Give autonomy to the project.
3. Select a team to execute the project within a timeline.
4. The project must be entirely different from the domain knowledge of your employees.
5. Determine the success metric. The project must encourage the employees to get into profitability at the earliest.
6. Let the team build their own metrics and execute in their own way.
7. They must document every roadblock they face and write a periodic white paper.
8. The company must act as an investor and allow the team to present their progress.
9. Do not declare that you are looking for the project and the team to fail.
10. If the team manages to pull off the project, help the project to get off the ground.
11. If the team fails, just celebrate the failure.

A part of your organization’s resources would be busy doing things that are not core to your business, and won’t bring immediate revenue. However, over a period of time, this will make your employees much more failure tolerant, which would bring them a lot of happiness. Employee happiness and the additional skills acquired through the power of failed attempts would improve the overall skills index of your organization.

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Rupam Das

Passionate, Accountable Student for Life