To make my point, I will distinguish two kinds of failure here: the one that happens in defined processes, and the one that happens in the course of exploration.
It’s obvious that in defined processes there should be no room for failure. If it still occurs, there’s either something wrong with the process design, or people have not been correctly instructed. Of course people make mistakes, but it’s again obligatory to design a process in a way that mistakes are being discovered and fixed underway.
On the other hand, when you’re setting out to do something you haven’t done before, there should be a lot of room for “failure”, beause in this case failure is to be defined different. It’s silly to expect that you will have figured out the new thing straight away and do everything right. Even if so, you’re then being confronted with the problem of figuring out possible mistakes and their remedying when you develop the process. No, in exploration there is only failure when you don’t learn from your mistakes.
Yet this is exactly the problem, because for many organisations failure is just that, not having met the goal, often not even knowing what the actual goal is. And these organisations are stuck, because nobody’s exploring anymore.
[…] give much room for failure yet do not reward people for not commiting it. As I pointed out earlier, the underlying mistake is a fuzzy definition of failure (and conclusively, an even fuzzier or […]
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