Creating a Failure Culture for Success

Despite common opinion, failure and success do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Does your organization support failure? Is failure part of your organization’s strategy, mission statement or culture? Does your leadership team endorse or encourage failure?

Failure has made up the backbone of corporate America. One example is the story of Milton Hershey. Every youngster around the globe has eaten a Hershey’s candy bar. What you probably don’t know is that Milton Hershey actually failed seven times before establishing what we know now as the Hershey Corporation.

But failure as a corporate initiative itself is generally avoided in these turbulent economic times. It’s avoided for many reasons, primarily fears about bad publicity, bad product, bad process and because quarterly profits are glorified in the board room. This is a distraction, however, from the inevitable reality that failure in the workplace is actually a good thing.

In reflection, our misconstrued reality of failure is one we learned in our youth. We all spent decades in classrooms figuring out arbitrary problems imposed by our teachers, day in and day out. Those problems were often boring, sometimes irrelevant, and laborious enough to make any student wish they were sick on a school day. The repeated practice of solving problems in our younger days led many to the conclusion that problems are bad.

Stepping into adulthood and corporate life, that same feeling about problems permeates our corporate work environment. Success is touted at both the organization and individual level.

But in an economy in which we’re required to do less with more as leadership scowls and individual fears increase–problems have become very bad. How do we change that and make failure a positive initiative in corporate America?

Currently at Beehive, we’re in the process of creating an Innovation Portal for a large financial services company and the topic of innovation is on our minds. Whether it’s educating employees about innovation, reading Scott Anthony’s brand new “Little Black Book of Innovation” or thinking about how to choose ideas companies should invest in–there’s no way around it: problems and innovation go hand in hand, and the information out there about the subject is daunting.

One glistening nugget of information on innovation and failure has emerged–a brilliantly simplistic idea of a “Failure Wall” first reported by NPR’s Here and Now. The wall itself is one CEO’s efforts to create a culture of acceptance around failure without risk of fear or retribution.

The sheer simplicity of this idea is quite beautiful. It’s not a book, it’s not a course. It’s not a corporate strategy or initiative. It’s simply a white wall.

One evening the CEO took a white board marker to a wall in a common area and wrote his biggest failure up on the wall. Then he wrote down three simple steps:

1. describe a time when you failed,
2. state what you learned
3. sign your name.

The CEO didn’t mention the wall, and there were no other forms of corporate communication about it. The “Failure Wall” simply existed as a part of the common area in the office.  Employees slowly filled up the wall with life lessons that spanned from their childhoods to chosen professions.

The amazing part was stepping back and seeing the stories – hundreds of stories – of failures of employees. It was a work of art, a visual dashboard that told the tale of many human beings’ most intimate stories of failures and subsequent successes.

If you were the CEO of a large organization, would you require failure from your employees? Would you include it in your three-year vision statement? Would you choose instead to ignore it? I’d venture a guess to say that 75% of Fortune 500 and 1000 organizations do not require failure from their employees or foster it at any level in their organizations. And for those 25% who do include it as part of their culture it’s generally not a requirement but a footnote.

The perspective on failure in the corporate setting has become an oxymoron. Failure is at once reviled yet needed;  if you aren’t failing, you probably aren’t learning and advancing.

We all know cultures are defined by the people who comprise the company or grow it from the top down. It is leadership’s job to ensure that potential hires are not only the right culture fit, but that they admit and acknowledge failure from the first day of being hired. Bottom line, it’s the culture of an organization that can make failure acceptable.

I’d like you all to seriously think about failure, and consider it in a positive way. When’s the last time you failed at work? What was the greatest failure that led to your most memorable success? When was the last time you admitted and acknowledged your failures at home or at work?

Today is the day to create a failure wall and write down one failure. It could be a childhood failure or recent failure on a project. Do it with family, friends or coworkers and don’t be afraid or fearful. Failure is a good thing-it’s pure innovation at its heart.

The art of living well is solving life’s problems and doing it with gusto.
Have you created your failure wall yet? Do it with gusto.

“Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
– Winston Churchill