Archives for August 2012

So you say that you are an innovator? Where is your failure resume?

We have all seen the endless number of quotes on how we should fail more, fail quickly, and fail often but what do we actually do with all of these failures?  If we are lucky we might actually take the time to learn from them but usually we quickly take stock in what happened and make a few mental notes to ensure that we don’t do it again.  Rarely do we share the details of your our failures even with friends or family and we certainly would never think of revealing our failures with colleagues or perspective employers.  Why do we have this inconsistency?  We know that failure is a necessary part of learning and growing for both the organization and the individual but we never want to admit to our failures?  If our resume is a collection of our successes… where is our failure resume?

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Want to feel better about your failure? Rebrand it as a pivot!

Back in 2009 Silicon Valley entrepreneur Eric Ries (@ericries) had coined the term “pivot” for the technique used by tech startups to change the strategic direction of their companies based on what they had learned (see his original post here).  The theory goes that by doing you are actually learning something along the way (see my previous post on learning from feedback loops in systems thinking) and that you might find the “something” that you had learned has a better chance of success than your original strategy.  The alternative is that at least it will enable you to extend your organization’s runway further out into the future in search of success.

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Burying acorns… the importance of rigor and planning for your future success.

With the dry weather this summer my backyard oak trees seem to have made a premature determination that fall has already arrived.  How do I know this?  By the amazing proliferation of acorns throughout my yard before August had even arrived.  As fast as the acorns could fall the family of gray squirrels was scampering across my yard burying their new found bounty. Although food was abundant the squirrels were making the effort to bury these acorns for their future survival.  While snow may come relatively early in Minnesota it wasn’t likely to start falling for at least three months but the squirrels weren’t waiting for even a moment to begin their work.

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Practicing Failure: Lessons from Michael Jordan & Olympic Athletes on Failure & Success

In early 2007 I was planning to launch my first Failure Forum.  The forums were a series of presentations (modeled after TED talks) with an ensuing discussion that were meant to examine internal innovation projects that had been shut down.  We sought to understand what had been accomplished with the project, what had we learned from it, and what would we do differently next time.  The truth was that many of the innovation projects were modeled after previous work.

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Should we learn to tolerate failure… even in the medical profession?

In an NY Times Op-Ed article yesterday, neurosurgeon and journalist Sanjay Gupta (@sanjayguptaCNN) cited a recent anonymous survey where orthopedic surgeons said “24 percent of the tests they ordered were medically unnecessary.”  The suggestion was that the surgeons were performing the unnecessary tests as a form of “defensive medicine” that is meant less to help the patient than to protect the doctor and hospital from lawsuits.  Why has it come to this?  How has society come to expect “zero defects” from the medical industry?

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