Innovation vs. The Fear of Failing

1
1301 views

Companies need their critical workforce to perform smarter, faster and more productively. Achieving that goal requires embedding collaborative innovation and technologies deep into processes and incentivizing collaborative behaviors — ultimately transforming the workflow to turn knowledge into action.

Everyone champions the word innovation, yet the reality of the definition is to "do something that has never been done before." The human psyche is risk or fear adverse. Therefore, innovation requires risk that most companies avoid due to fear.

In order to be successful, how can companies have both formal and informal processes in place to ensure innovative ideas are continually vetted, selected, prototyped, to either fail fast or adopt and commercialize quickly?

Innovation Management
Prototyping
Innovation Development
Innovative Thinking
Innovative Problem Solver
Failure Investigation
LEAN Startup
Lean Thinking
Commercialization
Start-ups
Entrepreneurial Skills
Entrepreneurship
Joshua Rand
75 months ago

19 answers

5

Employees are keenly tuned in to how the organization views and treats risk (and failure). If for instance, Joe's career stalls after being associated with a failure, no amount of encouragement to take risks is going to motivate employees to take them. So, adopting lean practices is one thing, living the practice and embracing it is another. Management needs to take the lead here and really show in tangible ways that it values and believes in this approach.

Michael Fruhling
75 months ago
I agree that leadership must embrace a formula that seeks success but values the learning that comes from failure. The original question suggests that this is accomplished through formal and informal processes. To demonstrate acceptance of failure, the processes related to HR, must be formal. They must balance risk/reward for the company with risk/reward for the individual's career. - Tucker 74 months ago
3

Fear is never a good motivator unless we have no other choices. However when we have a choice fear leads us to protect what we have and miss opportunities in the process. It dampens innovation. to promote innovation we must create transparent cultures that breed a safe place for people to work where they feel respect and valued consistently. We also need to coach, mentor and train people how to approach their fears productively. Once we do those two things innovation is much easier. Here is an interesting story that illustrates the point...

Rock Climbing: Fear and Performance
I have two children, both boys, and they are a blessing. Every day I learn from them probably more than they learn from me. Sometimes I learn positive things about myself and at other times I gain less flattering insights; and then sometimes they provide me flashes of brilliance that are timely and relate to my work. After all children are just small adults. This is one of those moments.

My oldest was 7 years old and my youngest was 4 years old. We were on vacation and came upon a rock climbing wall. Both of my children wanted to try climbing the wall. I have to tell you that I did not think my 4 year old would be allowed to participate due to his age and his overall size. 
After waiting in line it was time for my oldest some Aris to give it a try. He seemed to love the experience. He was having so much fun. He went about half way up the wall and then came down. As soon as he was on the ground he asked to go back up. So we let him have another try. Same thing again…He was truly enjoying himself. After he went up, about mid way, he came back down again. As you could already guess he was ready to start climbing again. Well there were others in line so although he was disappointed he understood and took off the safety harness. 
Next my youngest, Eli, was to try. They worked diligently to get the safety harness on tight. Once they felt confident they let him start up the wall.  He also made it midway up the wall and then something happened. He looked down and got scared; and I mean really scared. He was about to come down when I intervened. 

I asked him “What are you scared of?”

He said “I am scared of falling?”

So I proceeded to tell him that he would not fall and get hurt. I told him about the safety harness and how it worked. He was still scared. So I pointed to a man coming down from the top of the wall and showed him the harness in action. He soon realized that he would not get hurt. However, he was still frightened. 

I asked “Why are you still scared?”

He replied “I can’t see where to put my feet!”

I asked “Would it help if I talked you through where to put your feet?”

He said “Yes.”

At that point he started making his way up the wall. A crowd began to form. People started saying things like “Look, he’s going to make it to the top.” And they were right. This small little boy was actually going to climb the entire wall. He made it to the top and pushed the button that rang the bell signaling his success. The crowd cheered and I know I had a big smile on my face. 

When he was back on the ground he told me that he was scared. I told him I knew, but that I was proud of him because:
·        He admitted he was afraid
·        He was willing to talk about his fear/discomfort;
·        And he was willing to accept help

At that moment my oldest came over and said “Dad, I was scared too.”

I said “I had no idea. You looked like you were having so much fun. Why didn’t you say anything?”

He replied “I was afraid of what you might think of me.”

Both children were afraid. But only one of my children was comfortable admitting it --The one who made it up the wall. 

How many of us are afraid to fail? 

How many of our employees are afraid to talk about their fears? Their concerns? Their mistakes? 

How many of us, as managers, will miss the signs? 

How does all of this impact our performance individually? Collectively?

Fear can be our counselor or jailor. Each moment of each day we get to pick which one we allow it to be.

Brad Federman
70 months ago
What a terrific story, Brad Federman! - Michael 70 months ago
Thank you. - Brad 70 months ago
2

I think it starts with the leadership if they really consider innovation important. Fear of failure is everywhere in the business like the stock market, acquisition, management change etc. But these things are done too. 
Having said that, we need to understand one thing that innovation doesn't happen in a day. Its a time taking process. So, management should decide prototyping and pilot projects first with the small set of users. That is one of the proven exercises. 

Hitesh Mathpal
75 months ago
Again I agree with you. Innovation is a long process, you will never wake up a morning with a revolutionary idea. It takes time, you could take risks, but at the end if properly set up it will be successful (maybe with some luck too, why not?!) - Paolo 75 months ago
Right...innovation is what happens only when there is a enough persistence through a series of failures. - Thomas 75 months ago
Keep trying and you will then probably get a result as the end, just make different mistakes. "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result" (A. Einstein) - Paolo 70 months ago
2

Most people mistakenly focus on the 'idea', as the thing that makes the difference i.e. it's either a good idea or a bad idea, a valuable idea or a worthless idea, etc, etc. There are two key things missing from that assumption:

  1. It's not only about the idea - it's about the problem or need it is trying to fix. If the need is well understood, the ideas will be better developed to resolve the need, and people internally and externally are more likely to buy it, reducing the risk. Too many people come up with ideas which don't meet a well founded need - they invent the need to justify the idea.
  2. If it's a genuinely novel idea, then what you have is not just an innovation project - it's also a change management project. The idea doesn't sell itself - you have to work to help people reframe how they think of both the need and solutions. It may even change how they work, roles, responsibilities, etc inside the company, or change how customers have to act outside. Even good ideas fail if you don't pay attention to the people stuff.
Alan A
75 months ago
Alan Arnett, I agree with you: solve priblems, don't simply ideate. The people stuff is also critical as you astutely point out. - Michael 72 months ago
2

It's not first at all about process or any of the droll sad events that surround it. Rather, it's about principles of approach which essentially de-risks the whole innovation activity. Core to this regards into innovating at all but rather understanding who your firm is, what you are good at and not and how to interface persistently with the world around you, from customers, their customers and your suppliers, staff and other stakeholders to society itself and is critical trends emerging, growing and declining in importance and context.

This activity then reveals various insights, which are the biggest ones and thus where opportunity lay, what the "what must be trues" are thus what abstracted solutions look like. From here, one can then rank the what must trues, abstract their specifications and then look for the actual specific ways and forms that they can be embodied to deliver solutions to real problems and opportunities, in context and at very low investment. That's where real, low risk, low cost, transformative innovation occurs that we've done a hundred times before successfully on a commercial basis.

Corporate leadership must lay this groundwork, by example and through constant communication. None of this - and I mean none - happens periodically but rather is omnipresent. Eliminate the risk - eliminate the fear.

Adam Malofsky, PhD
75 months ago
2

Fear of failing is not an option in innovation. As an innovator you have to absolutely believe and remain focused in;

  • what you are doing and
  • what you might achieve


Unless you have confidence in what you are doing, nobody else will. Dealing with failure (sometimes very painful - I know) is realising that failure is simply an experience from which you will learn much more from than something that runs to expectations. By learning it is likely that you will make the idea, service or product you are developing stronger by being forced to confront issues that lead or might lead to failure. You cannot be an innovator unless you manage the risk of failure.

You may have assumed in the past that issues that have led to failure would work in your favour or simply did not identify as problem. Once you identify and understand the issues about failure you can respond, Failure is part of the innovation process and it is there to be scoped, identified, risk assessed, mitigated and managed - not ignored, Fear of failure is an irrational and emotive response to the loss of primarily confidence, control (usually from poor management) or a weakness that has not been addressed. The psychological downside is typically characterised by irrational behaviour (badly thought through decisions), depression and a lot worse. I didn't get quite this far - but I learned a lot about myself which made me whole lot stronger and my approach to innovation more structured and managed.

Paul D
72 months ago
2

Completely agree that "Innovation" is one of the most abused terminology in the industry today. And, the biggest blockage to it is the Culture and Leadership in the organizations. Thus it becomes much more important to bring in a change in working with time, money and efforts calibrated to enable Innovation in any company. For example, the Bi-Model IT/2 Speed IT model from Gartner helps in bringing focus on a) Run the business and b) Change the business areas where you run the Ops, BAU in parallel to Fast Prototyping and Quick Hypothesis testing to enable the culture of Fail Fast then subsequently Succeed Fast. Only this change in focus to drive an organization can help in making Innovation truly embedded. There are ways and frameworks which i can delve deep into, but 1-2-1, if anyone is interested.

Rudraksh Bhawalkar
72 months ago
1

It is important to realise that the fear of failure may manifest itself in preventing the innovation team moving forward. There are may be issues or lessons learned from the past that have been sanitised, simply not recorded or forgotten. As an innovator who I describe as facilitator or change, you constantly come up against barriers or rules that prevent progress. "You can't do that", "You can't talk to this person", "Stop doing this" etc.

I work on the premise that once you get three or more of these barrier events (No's) cropping up in short space of time or something that is inexplicable or unreasonable there is often someone's job on the line (Intuitive learning) which means there is an inherent fear of failure with this person who may hold a key decision making role and may have put in place policies, restrictions or criteria (often subjectively based on "their role & authority" rather than official rules or policies) that prevents effective progress.

This happens more often than you think it would.

Paul D
72 months ago
Without failures some great improvement wouldn't have been possible. Measure risks and jump out of your confort zone. I love this MJ quote "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life." - Paolo 72 months ago
I agree Paolo progress would not happen without failure, However the point I am making is to the disruption of the flow of the innovation progress by indivduals partcularly in large organisations. - Paul 72 months ago
1

Fail early and fail often. Might sound like a contradiction but if (and it is a big if) you learn something from the failure with minimal time investment for example, and can apply it with each iteration, your problem solutions will be stronger. Failing often is only viable in the long run if you do achieve successes more easily, of with less critical investments. Failure in sales results in a great many learning experiences that do, over time, translate into greater successes, but by no means does that eliminated failures altogether otherwise some sales people would be successful all of the time. At that point they get complacent and failure re-enters their daily selling activities.

Sandy Waters
71 months ago
Sandy, I think the failures continue into success with the frequency and magnitude decreasing because of less risk being taken (in most cases). - Paul 71 months ago
1

Over the past fifty years I have worked in or been a consultant with a great many companies ranging from Fortune 100 to back of the envelope startups. In nearly all cases fear of failure was not a great concern except at a personal individual level. Quite often corporations make decisions, often without proper vetting of ideas, and introduce hurdles that tend to reign in innovation. I worked in some companies where innovation was not the problem and they experienced a steady stream of breakthroughs yielding successful products or services. While others who were for a time very innovative, ultimately they did not succeed, and were acquired by others. Fear of failure was not an impediment to innovation. Internal processes and failure to properly understand market acceptance and customer dynamics were. As a process consultant, I frequently encounter internal cultures that are flat out risk averse. They were often the one-hit-wonder type, and did not even really put much effort into the next great things for them. Where small companies have ideas but lack experience and guidance to select and nurture the appropriate items, large companies tended to not have a culture that engendered the proverbial out of the box thinking and failed to capitalize on internal ideas, thus diminishing the creative spark that they once had that gave rise to their prior success. General Electric is a more recent model of this. From a highly innovative company that turned to acquiring other corporate business entities not in their main sphere of knowledge, they badly managed the acquisitions. Communication of the internal values of a company, regardless of size, helps to give employees an understanding of what drives the company forward. Communication with customers or potential customers, is required to make sure the innovation aligns with their current and future client needs.

Sandy Waters
70 months ago
1

On the subject of crowdsourcing platforms, my sense is that although large corporations might be willing to try them, their culture tends to inhibit and diminish the value of the information they receive through the crowdsourcing mechanisms, even if internally used to promote innovation. Most large companies would do well to create a subsidiary whose purpose it is to research and explore potential new ideas. Small companies have shorted chains and lines of communication and are more amenable to using crowdsourcing related to innovating new ideas.

Sandy Waters
70 months ago
Agree that small companies are more amenable to using crowdsourcing as they are more flexible and probably less departments are involved. Furthermore the inclination to risks and oppportunities is different. - Paolo 70 months ago
0

I agree with Michael, employees approach is based on the culture of the organization. The leadership team should lead the choice between innovation vs the fear of failing. The crucial aspect is that as soon as you make a choice you stick to it and support this strongly.
Indeed after a deep evaluation, if feasible I prefer to go for the innovation. The fear of failing is more missing opportunities to me.

Paolo Beffagnotti
75 months ago
"The fear of failing is more missing opportunities to me." That's very true. - Hitesh 75 months ago
it's the working expression for no pain no gain - Paolo 75 months ago
0

I concur with the statements made by Michael et al about an organization's cultural view of failure and how employees are treated with regard to taking risks. But I would take that one step further and say that it also has a great deal to do with the team's view of failure and risk-taking, which is directly related to how a manager positions and handles risk-taking and assesses the impact of the risk-reward scenario.

I've worked with and in organizations that were inherently risk-averse culturally, but that had break out innovations because one team (and its leader(s)) took an orthogonal approach to risk and had a higher tolerance and persistence.

The mindset that seems to be the most effective is to position "failure" not as a bad outcome to be avoided at all costs, but as an key opportunity for learning to do something better (hence that old "fail better" motto you hear bandied about, especially in tech).

Of course, in such situations, the team and its leader also were nimble in their ability to discern and assess risks and potential impact that, from the organization's perspective, were:

a) 'acceptable' -- The impact of a failure is minimal and provides and excellent learning opportunity
* True life example: Crafting a new software product to fit a market need they identified as critical for the business growth and that fit with the company's existing product offerings, testing the offering, and fine-tuning it for a successful release.

b) 'unacceptable' -- The impact of a failure is potentially negative / catastrophic and far-reaching for the organization, customers, etc.
* True life example: completely changing the underlying database to use a newer technology the week before a worldwide product release to major customers, thus allowing insufficient time to test and validate the choice, etc.

In short, in my experience, innovation successes occur when a team has the ability to both tolerate outcomes that are not perfect, and to discern between acceptable risks that produce good rewards, and unacceptable risks whose failure would create greater harm than good.

It's definitely an art, not a science. :)

Sarah Kling
75 months ago
0

To being, I want to share an excerpt from a blog post I wrote.

Trust in Serendipity (and 11 other reasons innovation programs struggle to be effective).

"Reason #2) Innovation has real risk (and nobody wants to admit it). 
Before getting to the points about learning to deal with failure, and managing risk, and mitigating risk, let there be a moment of pure, unfiltered, honest, frank, real honesty. An effective innovation program is all about creating risk. If the ideas and projects being generated and managed by the innovation program do not create risk of any kind (legal, regulatory, financial, personal, professional, organizational, market facing, etc.) then please shut the program down and invest those dollars more wisely on things like shareholder dividends and employee benefits. Innovation programs must push on things (conventions, beliefs, markets, etc.) and what it pushes on can break, or in the act of pushing, the program itself may suffer the fracture. There are really smart ways to manage and contain that risk, regardless of the business, market, risk, etc. But do not fail to mistake risk management with outright risk avoidance. Businesses are designed to avoid risk. Innovation programs must be designed to find and embrace it. If one is inclined to question this point, then do not bother to create an innovation intended to create the next “Uber” (as an example) without acknowledging that Uber’s entire business model pushes at systems and structures that, for their business, create tremendous risk (legal, compliance, regulatory, etc.)."

It's my observation that would-be innovators and so called "thought-leaders" want to frame the act of organized corporate innovation as something other than being risk-adverse--in opposition to the risk sensitive enterprise. When in fact innovators need to be as risk sensitive, or more sensitive, than the enterprise. And failure is not something we just get to "do" because we run/drive innovation. We fail when we don't do the follow:

1.) Learn from each experiment
2.) Spend our time, resources, and cash wisely (within the framework of a very logical system of controls)
3.) Bring solutions to market that have no chance of creating value

We should fear all of those things, to our core. This will keeps us sharp, motivated, and alert to potential doom. And if you do any of the things above consistently, then your tenure in this space should be short lived.

The question is not whether you should fear failure, which you should. It's how you 1.) define success and failure, and 2.) how you managed the risks that lead to failure. Do you have a framework that contains risk? Does it have clear and repeatable rules for how to proceed and how to kill initiatives?

Gregory Hicks
75 months ago
Gregory Hicks, I support your sentiment. Many companies skirt the issue entirely with a stream of relatively low risk initiatives that are generally deliverable on a planning calendar. No big ideas, but no big failures either. That can be a fairly successful approach, but certainly leaves the company vulnerable to disruptive forces. - Michael 72 months ago
0

Culture seems to be the key word in most responses, but that can be vague in some companies/teams. Leadership can use the right language to support innovation, but walking the talk when out of the spotlight can differ.

Fear of failing is not always the barrier, but sometimes a necessary checkpoint, to ensure the innovation has had the right due diligence done (be it partially theoretical etc). The fear can be converted into interest if the team presenting the innovation can win the leadership audience. Doesn't always need to be a great talker or seller, but presenting the logic, aligning the assumptions, and sharing the potential reward for the business, can take huge steps towards converting the fearful into the supporters - every leader wants to be associated with a winning bet.

What i have seen work well to enable/nurture innovation, linked to culture, is for every employee to "own" their area. They understand the expected outputs, they understand the expected behaviors up/down/side stream, but have the "freedom & responsibility" to execute their role a best as they can. Converted into practice, i have seen Supply Planners who are responsible for logistics costs, product age on delivery, and customer stock availability, make drastic changes to the way they work to deliver better performance on all metrics. Incremental changes, checking progress on metrics, listening to the voice of customers, and diving deep into their data. They negotiated different terms with source factories, converted some replenishment from Push to Pull, brokered different sea freight routes partnered with procurement, worked with customer warehouse managers on receiving & inventory practices etc. They were not the only person in that GMNC to have that mindset.

Matthew Theocharous
75 months ago
0

When we focus on transforming knowledge into invoices, the equation will then be complete. By transforming standardised work based mass production into custom mass production companies can ensure the innovative are adopted and commercialize. This needs prototype validation. In custom mass production, being the customer targeted that validation will not like a rocket science. As customer in most case has no idea what they want but when they see, they can tell, an informal processes to seek customer feedback in prototype followed by formal validation process can be ideal in several occasions.

Narayan G
75 months ago
0

Innovation = change management informed by data. If this is understood by the organization, and endorsed by the leadership, than fear is much less present. In most cases, what is feared most is the unknown. I've brought innovation into large corporates and government, and found out one common success factor: invest time upfront into articulating why this is done. For an operational company, the easiest thing is to do nothing at all. Once an organization "agrees" to change, it is leadership's job to decide why: is it to create "new invoices" in 36 months? Is it to re-fresh the brand? Is it to open up new "blue ocean" opportunities? It can take over a year to agree on the reason behind innovation but once this is done, the rest is a measurable and manageable process.

Veronika Litinski
75 months ago
0

This is an interesting question and one that people don’t immediately think would relate to healthcare. However, many industries can take a cue from the healthcare industry in that medicine is changing every day. We have developed cutting edge technology allowing us to save extremely premature infants, have people live with a device that assists their heart to function, growing embryos in Petri dishes and then successfully helping women carry those embryos to term, and helping people recover from devastating injuries. These cutting edge technologies came from those of us in the healthcare industry “figuring out” how to push the limits with one goal in mind.... to save a life. What I think that many other industries can learn from is that when the ultimate goal that you are working towards has a high stake those that are working towards finding a solution - and taking that leap of faith - may be more likely to take those risks. In the healthcare industry, we are working towards being more customer focused and looking at our work in terms of improving customer service. So, developing innovative ideas on how to improve customer satisfaction, customer relations, and the delivery of healthcare are now being adopted from the sales industry. It’s a great collaboration and an exciting time to be in leadership in healthcare.

Beth Condley
72 months ago
0

I think a point we've missed here is: WHO gets to take the risk.

In non-publicly listed companies, we are so much more prepared to forgive failed risks at the leadership level. But if an employee were to make the same mistake, or something of much smaller magnitude? It would be upheld as an example, and the employee would be crucified.

It's also interesting that the people who we EXPECT to exhibit risk-taking behavior, i.e. Sales professionals, investment bankers, etc---don't always have the required homework needed to support their behavior. I personally hate how leadership readily invests in unqualified salespeople, but thinks twice when a marketing professional demands similar investment, albeit with much more to justify it.

What do you think?

Nayyara Rahman
66 months ago

Have some input?