If Failing Fast Is Good, Why Aren’t Mistakes Rewarded?
Bill Gates recently stated that Microsoft didn’t miss the mobile phone wave, but the fact that they could not capture the leadership position is clearly a mistake. Gates will likely take corrective actions, but at a more granular level it brings up an interesting point about how organizations deal with mistakes.
Most literature about innovation tells us that making mistakes is fundamental to creative thinking. As the global creative chief at 20th Century Fox, Ricardo Crespo says, “A mistake isn’t a failure. It’s a masked innovation, waiting to be revealed.” In addition to this, Fail Fast, Succeed Faster is treated as a success mantra in today's ultradynamic world.
With so much focus on experimentation and failing, why is making mistakes still looked down on in most organizations? To answer this holistically, we need to look at the word "mistake" rather minutely.
Mistakes can be broadly classified as either a good mistake or a bad mistake. As Sam Harrison states, "Good mistakes are strong actions, bad results. Bad mistakes are sloppy or lazy efforts, bad results." A mistake can be considered as one only if it’s done once and not repeated. Smart people tend to learn from other's mistakes and resolve not to repeat them. In other words, mistakes translate into failure more so only when they are repeated.
How can organizations respond to employee's mistakes? In his book The Little Book of Coaching: Motivating People to Be Winners, Ken Blanchard suggests a response model that could be used to better deal with mistakes. There are four ways a coach can respond to work done:
- No response: There is no acknowledgement whatsoever of the work done.
- Negative response: The coach is always on the lookout for a mistake and blasts off, if it happens.
- Redirection response: The coach helps the employee understand the correct way and helps redirect the energies of the employee toward the goal when a mistake happens.
- Positive response: The coach makes an effort to find the positive things and bestows a genuine appreciation for the good job done.
In order to build a culture in which mistakes are acknowledged and not reprimanded, redirection and positive response could be used more effectively in organizations. However, this largely applies to good mistakes that are a result of the creative process.
Larry Page's response to Sheryl Sandberg's mistake that cost Google millions of dollars is legendary in this regard. As Larry Page said, “I’m so glad you made this mistake, because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don’t have any of these mistakes, we’re just not taking enough risk.”
Recognizing success is important, but organizations should not stop there. To really build a culture of innovation, organizations must find creative ways to recognize and reward mistakes as well.
Do you agree?
