There are few organizations in the world that better understand the importance of learning from our failures than the United States Armed Forces. In fact, every branch of the US military uses an After Action Review (AAR) process to analyze the successes or failures of their missions by examining what happened, why it happened, and how it can be done better next time. The AAR is focused on creating a clear comparison of what were the intended results vs. the actual results.
On Veterans Day, I thought it would be a great opportunity to learn from one of the wisest soldiers that I know, Lt. Col Mark Weber. Weber, a former Cretin-Derham Hall classmate and Humphrey School Policy Fellow has spent 23 years in the United States Army, including five years as a soldier and 18 as a commissioned officer. During a recent visit to Minnesota the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey (@Martin_Dempsey), praised Mark for his leadership in many distinguished roles, most notably citing his work in Iraq with Gen. David Petraeus. In Iraq, Weber was the senior advisor to Gen. Babaker Shawkat Zebari, the commander and chief of staff of the Iraqi Armed Forces.
While we were working together a few years ago Mark had introduced me Murphy’s Laws of Combat. Being passionate about how to lead through failure I thought the Military Planning section of the laws were particularly interesting when it came to our notions of military success and failure.
Military Planning (from Murphy’s Laws of Combat):
So if military leaders know that their plans will be imperfect, difficult to execute, and that they won’t survive contact with the enemy intact how do they move forward? What follows is from a recent Q&A session with Mark on his thoughts on Leadership, Learning, and Failure from a soldier’s perspective.
Q1. In general, the media portrays the military as an intensely “mission” driven organization where the mission is often to destroy the enemy, take a strategic objective, or rescue a threatened group. The “successful” completion of the mission is recognized as the top priority in every military operation with the welfare of the soldier coming second. How would you characterize the Army’s philosophy around failure?
Weber: The military places an extraordinary amount of emphasis on the After Action Review and the learning power of failure. But our profession struggles like any other, because our members are no less human than anyone else. Ego and pride do not discriminate amongst professions, particularly at the younger ages. Ideally, military personnel are exposed to the self-evident virtues of failure and become wise “graybeards” as they pass the fifteen year mark and enter senior command. Unfortunately, in my experience, at least half the population of senior leaders never quite “matures” with the concept. Insecurity and destructive selfish behavior follows their failures, and they create a generation of young officers and soldiers who “learn” that there is no excuse for failure. And on this point I find myself going easy on my brothers and sisters, because the cost for failure is higher in our profession than in any other – people’s lives. The paradox with failure in our profession is that death is often, understandably, viewed as failure. But this line of thinking is dangerous, because even the best laid plans result in death. So failure, like success, is often left to be defined by the leader. Sometimes this is the military leader, but as we often see in the news it is frequently defined by our civilian leaders.
Q2. As a student and now teacher of military history, do you have any “go-to” examples of military failure that you have used as a lesson for your students?
Weber: I wouldn’t say I have a “go to” example. The variables are so complex, that I prefer to use contemporary examples (i.e. a training exercise involving a student leader, in which case multiple students rotate through a role as the leader.) A couple of “gold standard” examples of these experiential opportunities for young men and women would include the military Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC) and the civilian outdoor leadership program, Outward Bound.
Unless someone is willing to take a solid few hours to discuss a military figure/leader, there are simply too many variables involved. The instruction becomes time prohibitive and leaders become more myth than real; students then end up taking the wrong lesson. Too often we see “Oh, his success revolves around the fact that he was so tough and ruthless” when in fact, the leader’s greatest strength was diplomacy behind the scenes.
Q3. In business we build “strategic plans” that try to lay out the steps necessary in a path for an organization for the next 3 to 5 years with the understanding that planning for an unknown future will often time be riddled with errors or mistakes. With the obvious importance on preparedness the military must also prioritize strategic planning. In your observation how does the military deal with the level of uncertainty involved in strategic planning and the potential for the resulting errors and mistakes?
Weber: Some leaders do great. They’re secure in themselves. They intrinsically know the truth of what your question presumes: plans will be riddled with errors and, I would add, numerous evolutions, and maybe even a revolution. Other leaders are horrible, ghastly horrible. For fear of making a mistake, they never complete a plan, nor do they ever put their weight behind what little planning they have, even though they know the same truth. The difference, of course, is that whereas one leader sees strength in the errors they KNOW will come; another leader sees weakness in the errors they KNOW will come. That is the irony. Again, what makes the Armed Services different is the fact that human lives are on the line. It’s one thing to get a policy wrong and play “what if” games that cannot be proven or disproven. It is quite another to see dead soldiers and do the same thing. It can be torture for the insecure leader and sometimes even the secure leader. I think the question is best answered by reviewing just how much effort – or, more precisely, how much critical thinking – went into the 3-5 year plans. Some leaders mistake “time spent on the effort” with “critical thinking spent on the effort.”
Q4. It has been noted that all branches of the US military use an After Action Review (AAR) process to analyze their performance after a mission. The topics discussed encompass what happened, why it happened, and how it can be done better next time. The AAR is focused on creating a clear comparison of what were the intended results versus the actual results. What are your general thoughts about the AAR? Where/when have you seen it used well? Have you witnessed times where it didn’t work?
Weber: I would dare say that AT LEAST half of the hundreds and hundreds of AAR’s I’ve seen in my career are conducted poorly – even with an “observer controller” present to help referee. Incidentally, you made one of the most common errors in asking the question above: you left out “What was your plan?” During the AAR, participants often FLY past the plan, as if it’s irrelevant now that it’s been executed. If it’s not part of your AAR process, beg the question: if the planning and the plan aren’t important in the AAR, then why should we even do it in the first place and where would the “intended results” come from? Personally, I think too many leaders short change the plan/planning phase by waving the flag of “there will be errors anyway” as they proceed into execution without the critical thinking mentioned earlier.
I think the AAR is a beautiful tool, when used properly. I think they are used best when an “observer controller” (OC) can be used to referee the four points of the AAR. Ideally the OC is someone who was not involved in planning or execution. In some settings it’s best to have OC’s rotate into such a role from a previous role as follower or leader. This rotation not only builds empathy for each of the positions, it provides an incentive amongst all participants to be as even handed as possible in their critique and their questions. Senior mentors also help to ensure that when everyone appears to be going too easy on each other, the honest or divisive questions actually get asked.
What are the attributes needed for a good OC? Martha Raddatz (@MarthaRaddatz) was a great example during the VP debate! She wasn’t there just to ask questions (or vague ones at that). She was there to press specific answers, and to guide participants back to the subject matter if they strayed off topic which is another one of the most common mistakes in AAR. Why do leaders do this? Ego! Forget politics now. No one wants to be wrong; excuses and blame will always slip into the conversation! That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, per se, but it is bad when you’re trying to get to the heart of what is ailing your team’s efforts!
Food For Thought:
LINK – Lt Col. Mark Weber has published a new book Tell My Sons that is available now for pre-orders and will begin shipping December 10, 2012.
VIDEO – Gen. Martin E. Dempsey awards Army Lt. Col. Mark Weber the Legion of Merit medal at his an End of Service ceremony on August 16th, 2012.
Last June marked the fifteenth year since I graduated from b-school at the Carlson School of Management. Over the summer I had been asked by the school to do an interview and answer a few questions looking back on my experience. I had recently published a blog post on “Three Things I Learned in B-school” that focused on the lessons that had followed me throughout my career but as I prepared for this interview I was thinking more about how much had changed in the world since I had graduate. I was quickly blown away with my quick list of changes that I had written down: medical discoveries, the Internet explosion, software development, redefining business and leadership theories, and the advances in telecommunications to name just a few.
The adoption of cell phones and now smartphones in the last 15 years has been staggering. According to the CTIA (article here), a wireless industry trade group, in June 1997 there were 48.7m cell phone subscribers in the US or 18.3% of the population. By June 2012, there were 321.7m subscribers in the US or 101% of the population. That means that there are more cell phones in the US then there are men, women, and children combined. Since most children don’t have cell phones (yet) there are tens of millions of adults who have more than one cell phone. Just think of how the cell phone has changed how we communicate with family, friends, and colleagues.
I tried to capture some of these changes during my interview as I briefly discussed how remote computing technology has drastically changed the definition of when and where we work, the necessity to stay curious through the hastening pace of technology changes, and importance of recognizing that through all of this innovation organizations are going to fail and that failure is an important part of the process.
Here is a link to the full article (Matt Hunt – The Changing Landscape of Technology) with the interview below.
So I thought I would take a break on this post from my usual topics of failure or innovation and instead focus on a lesson in leadership and philosophy. Last week Alan Wurtzel wrote an insightful post titled “What Circuit City Learned about Valuing Employees” for the HBR Blog. The article describes how important it is to respect your employees and give them the opportunity to grow. For the first 50 years this was a core value at Circuit City but by 2000 the company’s executives had all but eviscerated that belief and by the end of 2009 Circuit City was gone. As I read this article I kept thinking that these were some very important lessons to be learned for every retailer, especially Circuit City’s last remaining true competitor, Best Buy.
Alan Wurtzel was President and CEO of Circuit City from 1966 until 1986 and was the son of Sam Wurtzel, the man who founded Circuit City in 1949. The company was originally known as Wards Company and was headquartered in Richmond, VA. According to Alan his dad always know that the only way to get results was through the efforts of your people, which meant respecting them and giving them an opportunity to grow. This thinking was different than much of the management theory of the day that had followed from the Henry Ford assembly lines and mass production theory from Frederick Taylor where every worker was just a part of the machine.
Alan mentions how his father was excited to have read similar thinking in “The Human Side of Enterprise” by MIT professor Douglas McGregor. McGregor had explained his alternative hypotheses of people management (called personnel back then) Theory X and Theory Y. In Theory X employees were naturally lazy and thus had to be closely supervised and controlled. But Theory Y was almost the opposite in the belief that people enjoyed mental and physical activity, sought opportunities to be creative, and wanted to succeed at work.
Alan suggests that it was because of his father’s focus on treating his employees well and creating opportunities for them to grow that Circuit City flourished. Between 1949 and 2000, Circuit City would grow to become the most profitable independent consumer electronics chain in the United States. But there was a fundamental shift going on inside the organization during its last decade of existence. Employees were being seen as fungible and disposable economic units more akin to Theory X. Alan cites this shift as the primary cause of Circuit City’s demise, “When workers are treated as cogs in a machine instead of flesh-and-blood human beings, they naturally fail to give their best efforts. When that happens, sales and margins decline, turnover increases and profits plummet.”
While there have been other reasons cited as playing a part in Circuit City’s demise, including poorer performing retail locations and a lack of enough cash on hand to weather the economic downturn, there was no doubt that a broad base of their employees were roiling when they simultaneously eliminated commissions and laid off 3900 salespeople in 2003. In 2007, Circuit City again laid off 3400 of their better paid sales associates and implemented a “wage management” program that cut salaries of almost every remaining employee. Throughout the decade there had been numerous customer lawsuits including false advertising and breach of contract. And by 2008 there was major concern in the vendor community as Circuit City prepared for bankruptcy filings, the company had debts of $2.3b and owed Hewlett-Packard $119m and Samsung Electronics $116m.
During the 2000’s Circuit City had violated all three tenants of the “Retail Silver Rule: Do not do unto your employees, customers, or vendors what you would not have them do unto you.” (See Silver Rule vs Golden Rule). They had violated their employees, they had violated their customers, and they had violated their vendors by treating them with disrespect or taking advantage of them.
Food for thought:
Linked2Leadership published my article yesterday titled “Hey Leaders: Failure Isn’t a Dirty Word.” In the article I describe how avoidance is a natural psychological response to failure but by doing so we miss out on the opportunity to learn from our mistakes. I go on to describe some of the key takeaways from each failure and how it is rarely beneficial to seek to place blame when sharing internal failures since it almost never never lies with just one source. I finish the article with a reminder that the for innovation to be part of a repeatable cycle you cannot short circuit the failure process and you must treat your innovation leaders well if you want the organization to continue taking risks.
I have copied the first part of the post below and linked to the complete article.
Failure. It’s a word that evokes fear. And for good reason: We’re taught to avoid it at all costs.
And when it happens, “never admit it!”
Failure = Bad
Our brains automatically try to distort, deny, or manipulate our sense of reality to make failure less damaging to our ego. Beyond that, we’re also protecting our livelihoods. After all, failure could lead to the loss of a job or hard-built reputation, which could not only harm us but the families that depend on us.
As a leader, failure all too often is equated with the fear of losing your organization, your department, and your people.
It’s Not all Bad
In manufacturing, the goal is to eliminate failure from the processes by driving toward zero defects—a goal based on the routine nature and highly probable outcomes of the process. But innovation is a little different.
Innovative timelines can be three to five years (or more) and it’s much more difficult to predict the future. The more uncertainty involved, the higher the probability the project will fail to meet objectives.
Failure is a possible (and sometimes more probable) outcome from work in driving innovation. If we decide to ignore our failures, sweep them under the rug or run in the opposite direction, we will never have the opportunity to learn from our mistakes.
…
http://linked2leadership.com/2012/10/25/hey-leaders-failure-isnt-a-dirty-word/
I have to admit that I’m pretty excited! My interview with MO.com was published yesterday on my work in launching my writing, blogging, and speaking business with MattHunt.co & FailureForums.com. In the interview I discuss my personal failure story and my subsequent interest in helping organizations understand the importance of planning for and learning from failure.
I wanted to offer a quick “thank you” to everyone for their support and feedback over the last few months!
Here is the first part of the article…
“Most businesses are not equipped to handle failure. They are not prepared to address the impact of failure on the organization prior to launching these innovations, and are, therefore, ill-prepared when it does happen – impacting everyone involved.”
Matt Hunt is a professional speaker, blogger, consultant and founder of Stanford & Griggs, LLC. With over 20 years of business and technology experience he has a demonstrated excellence in business strategy, innovation, and leadership development with large companies, small companies and non-profit organizations.
Matt has worked for Morgan Stanley and Best Buy throughout most of his career. During his time in corporate America, he saw that failure has recently become a favorite buzzword in the popular press and business journals. However, it is still a tainted word in most American businesses that are driven by continued career growth, quarterly profitability and shareholder returns. Executives rarely get promoted based on their long list of failures and employees who risk becoming intrapreneurs are often discouraged from telling their stories and frequently end up leaving the organization where that wisdom becomes lost forever. This missed opportunity to learn from our failures became the spark Matt needed to fuel his drive to move innovation forward. Now, Matt Hunt is ready to share this wisdom and innovation strategies with your organization to fuel innovation and catalog failure as a learning tool to drive organizational enhancement.
Here is the link to the entire interview: http://www.mo.com/Matt-Hunt-Failure-Forums
As I have been working on researching what is necessary to create a successful innovation pipeline in an organization one theme has consistently been mentioned – the necessity for strong leadership. Many involved note that Leaders who drive innovation work need to be stronger leaders and have fewer deficiencies than their peers running core business segments. Because innovation work does not share the same scorecard as core businesses it is much more difficult for innovation leaders to measure their team’s performance, understand the many roadblocks to their success, and monitor the team’s emotional state.
As the economy slowed down over the last few years, many I have talked to report that the investment in strengthening leadership skills has taken a back seat in priority to driving P&L performance. In my personal observation there was both less money to spend toward leadership development activities and it was more difficult to make the time available to focus on the topic.
A few of the attributes for innovation leaders that were specifically called out were: 1) they need to be comfortable not having all of the answers but able to empower their people, 2) they need to ensure that all voices are heard within the team, 3) they need to be politically adept to support their team within the organization, and 4) they need to be able to motivate their teams through challenging times. This is by no means a comprehensive list but it captures how these leaders need to have a high degree of competence in varying aspects of leadership.
Food for thought:
A couple of days ago I heard about another amazing example of a “child” showing us their own power of creativity to drive innovation and I thought about a recent experience playing a game with my son . A child’s ability to create a hypothesis, test, and verify process is no less than an adults and it may be improved since they are not bridled by the fear of failure. This year we have seen a couple of the most astonishing medical inventions come from work of teenagers! How do we continue to create an environment where they are able to discover, explore, and create? If their current pace of innovation continues maybe we will need to start referring to them as the MD-Generation?
Earlier this summer I was reminded of a simple fact from my 6 year old son: kids will try things, they will sometimes fail, and they won’t worry about it. My son had discovered a new app for the iPad – Plants vs. Zombies. The app was $2.99 and we normally would not let him download an app that wasn’t free. But this time he was just so persistent and eventually he figured out a way to get what he wanted. He suggested that he would pay us the $3 from his birthday money so that he could buy the app. It was incredible to see how much he loved playing that game all summer long. The strategy of the game is to use different types of plants to defend your house from different types of zombies before they break in and eat your brains. Pretty simple really.
One day we were discussing a strategy for one of the levels and I had told him what my suggestion was for winning the level. Like often happens, he didn’t want to hear any of it. He just wanted to test his theory and he started placing his plants on the board. I too could be persistent and again I shared my theory and this time I explained why I thought it was a better strategy. He still wasn’t sold. This was the classic determination that we have seen from this child for most of his life. I may have thought I knew the “right” answer but he wasn’t interested in hearing it. Instead he wanted to test his own hypothesis. He may have failed but he didn’t care. It was just a game and with a little persistence who knows maybe his theory would work too?
Back in May of this year a persistent 15 year old boy from Crownsville, MD won the grand prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. He had lost an uncle to pancreatic cancer and he knew first hand how important early screening was. He had worked daily with a researcher from John’s Hopkins University (with his mom driving him back and forth) to develop a “dip stick” like test that could detect cancer in a person’s blood or urine. The test was over 90% accurate and was 28 times cheaper and faster than the current test or about $0.03 and a 5 minute wait. For his innovation Jack Andraka won the $75,000 grand prize and the admiration of many. When his mother was asked how Jack had become so creative she answered with her secret recipe. When Jack would ask a question at home, she wouldn’t answer it. Instead, she would ask him what he thinks, what his hypothesis was, and she would then tell him to go figure it out. Brilliant… discovery through trial and error! By the way, Jack’s test not only succeeds in identifying pancreatic cancer but it could also detect ovarian and lung cancer too. (Link here)
Earlier this week we heard of another incredible story of medical invention coming out of Morristown, NJ. Catherine Wong, a 17 year old, had created a prototype of a portable electrocardiogram (EKG) that can connect to a cell phone via Bluetooth and transmit the results over a cellular network. Her invention won her a spot as a finalist in this year’s Goggle Science Fair and she placed first in a recent National Public Radio competition (Joe’s Big Idea). The impact can be enormous for an invention like this because it uses inexpensive off the shelf parts to provide a solution to so many people in developing countries who don’t have access to hospitals or cannot afford treatment from doctors. (Link here)
Food for thought:
Receive periodic email updates from Matt Hunt including his published pieces, updates on his progress, and more!
