How to become less scared of failure
Failure comes in three flavours says Amy Edmonson in her new book Right Kind of Wrong, basic failures, complex failures and intelligent failures. We are meant to make mistakes she argues. Learning about each of these types of failures will help you become less scared of them.
I joined a Q&A facilitated by the Growth Academy this week and heard Professor Amy Edmondson author of Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well explain how common thinking about failures as either: avoid failure at all costs or fail fast, fail often doesn’t help us learn how to fail well.
And this holds back our personal and organisational development.
In her view there are three types of failure:
Basic failures: these happen in a familiar area and caused by human or other reasons that are predictable. These are undesirable and efforts should be spent on preventing them.
Complex failures: perfect storms of factors that are unlikely and typically not repeatable. They occur due to the inherent uncertainty of a system or work: A particular combination of needs, people, and problems that may have never occurred before. Triaging patients in a hospital emergency room, running a fast-growing start-up all occur in unpredictable situations. These usually occur due to a series of small failures. Avoiding consequential failures means rapidly identifying and correcting small failures.
Intelligent failures: these are inherently ‘good’ because they advance understanding and develop new capabilities. They occur when experimentation is necessary. A new perspective on strategic experimentation is to drop the notion of ‘trial and error’ suggesting right and wrong. Replace it with expected outcome and learning opportunity. Not win or lose, win or learn. The right kind of experimentation produces good failures quickly. Managers who practice it can avoid the unintelligent failure of conducting experiments at a larger scale than necessary.
By looking at failures from these perspectives it makes less scary and more encouraging to make mistakes. We need them to innovate, develop and grow. Failure is just feedback, nothing more.