SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard
Business Review.
I'm Sarah Green.
I'm here today with HBS Professor Amy Edmondson, who's
the author of the April, 2011 article, Strategies for
Learning from Failure.
Amy, thanks so much for joining us today.
AMY EDMONDSON: Delighted to be here.
SARAH GREEN: In the article, you talk about a number of the
obstacles that really prevent us from learning from failure.
And a big one is the blame game.
And unfortunately, I think that's a familiar
one to a lot of us.
Why is that still such a challenge?
AMY EDMONDSON: The blame game is still such a challenge
because I think it's something very deeply ingrained in our
psychology.
And as small children, we learn pretty early on that if
we do something wrong, get blamed, it's an emotionally
unpleasant feeling.
We don't want to experience it.
We try to push it away.
That childhood feeling follows us through our developing
years, our adult years.
We bring it into the workplace.
And again, for reasons that are both emotional and quite
logical, connected with promotions and other
activities, we don't want to be blamed for
things going wrong.
SARAH GREEN: You mention that there is a sort of false
dichotomy here that's also at work.
Can you talk a little bit more about how we get stuck in that
and what that exactly is?
AMY EDMONDSON: Here's the dilemma, most managers
understand logically that it's important to learn from the
failures that do occur.
At the same time, they're worried that if they are open
and accepting of failures, they'll create a sort of
anything goes atmosphere, where there's not high
standards and people can pretty much perform at
whatever level they want and that'll be fine.
That's a false dichotomy.
So that assumes that would be a true worry in a world where,
in advance, we could know exactly what to do
and how to do it.
And those who didn't do it should certainly be held
accountable for not doing it precisely right.
In reality, and in the workplace that we now face, a
minority of work falls into that category.
Most work is of the kind where there are certain
uncertainties.
There's lots of novelty.
There's lots of need for creativity and new ideas.
And it's a given that some portion of that new
work will go wrong.
And that's a given that we want to learn from it.
It's not a given that we do learn from it.
SARAH GREEN: So when we are trying to learn from it, in
addition to the blame game, what are some of the other
things that get in the way?
AMY EDMONDSON: One of the important things that gets in
the way of learning from failure, is that we don't have
or practice the skills for doing it very often.
And by skills, maybe I should really say activities, the
activities that are very basic and very obvious, and yet,
often underutilized.
And so the skills I talk about in the article are the skills,
organizationally and individually, of detecting
failure, analyzing failure-- really skillfully, fully,
thoroughly--
and creating failure.
Why would you want to create failure?
We want to create failure because when you experiment--
which you need to do under conditions of uncertainty and
novelty or both--
some of those experiments will produce failures.
We hope they'll be intelligence failures.
But we know that we'll get failures.
So those three activities, detecting failure, analyzing
failure, and producing intelligent failure are skills
that we can learn, that we can practice, but often they are
given short shrift.
SARAH GREEN: I'd like to get into a sort of case
study, if we could.
I know that you did an extensive study of the
Columbia spatial explosion.
What did you find as a result of that?
I mean, could it have been averted, do you think?
AMY EDMONDSON: It absolutely could have been averted.
So there's two levels of analysis on
the Columbia shuttle.
There's two ways we can make the claim that the tragedy
could have been averted.
One is, let's go back in time, and say that had NASA
responded to the many, many very small and seemingly
unimportant foam strike failures.
A foam strike failure is a time that a bit of foam comes
off the solid rocket booster and hits something.
Generally it might hit the ground.
In this case of the Columbia shuttle, it hit the orbiter,
the shuttle.
And we now know, left a big hole, which meant that when
the shuttle came back into the atmosphere, it burnt
immediately on reentry.
So two ways in which that could have been averted, one
is that throughout the many years of the shuttle program,
when these small failures were being essentially ignored--
they were discussed a little bit, but held at bay--
they probably won't amount to anything, probably won't turn
to a major failure.
And we have too many other things to think about.
Most managers can identify with that statement.
So had those early warnings of a problematic phenomenon been
really dug into, they could have found a way to not have
it keep happening, and then therefore, not happen in the
Columbia 2003 shuttle launch.
So that's one level.
It's long over time.
It's the kind of small things that organizations ignore for
a long time.
They don't seem that important, don't seem worth
spending the resources and time on fixing.
The other is that upon launch in January of 2003, this is
fairly large, in fact much larger, 200 times larger than
any prior foam strike, came off and may
have hit the shuttle.
So the engineers were watching the videotape of the launch
that the next day.
And the videotape was grainy, and inexact, and they couldn't
really tell.
But they were worried, particularly Rodney Rocha, who
was an expert in the foam insulation.
And he watched the video over, and over, and over, and didn't
feel good about it.
He then tried to get more senior manager attention to
the problem.
He wanted a full-out, deep-dive, let's find out
whether or not this created damage to the shuttle.
And if so, then we'll figure out what to do about it.
He was unable to get--
and his strategies were not good enough-- but he was
unable to get attention to that potential, not necessary
failure, but that potential failure.
Had he gotten attention to it, the Columbia Accident
Investigation Board report that came out a few months
later suggested that there were two possible rescue
scenarios for the crew.
Neither one was an obvious slam dunk,
it'll work, no worries.
But they were both feasible and worthy of effort, was
within the CAIB concluded.
SARAH GREEN: So in a case like a space shuttle explosion,
which is, as you point out, not just a failure but a
tragedy involving a loss of human life.
In any failure like that when lives are on the line, is
there a qualitative difference in sort of how we respond to
it or learn from it?
Or is it just sort of an order of magnitude difference from a
sort of typical business failure?
AMY EDMONDSON: I think there are mostly order of magnitude
differences in terms of the scale, or size, or magnitude
of harm of a failure.
Learning from failures requires essentially the same
kinds of practices and processes.
Obviously we're more concerned about failures that have
bigger consequences, and particularly when they lead to
loss of human life.
However, the strategy and the desire to learn from them are
identical, I would argue.
And the reason is you want to develop those skills, those
practices, so that it becomes second nature, it becomes
habitual to learn and learn thoroughly from the small and
large failures that do occur.
SARAH GREEN: So it sounds like one of the key things is
getting people to speak up.
How can leaders really make it an environment where people
can speak and where they're heard.
AMY EDMONDSON: It is a crucial question, how can leaders
create an environment where people feel free and
comfortable to speak up with not just certain disaster, but
their worries, their concerns, their maybe this isn't quite
right kinds of ideas.
And in the article, I suggest a set of strategies that I
really do consider, from my
research, as the best practices.
And they start, interestingly, with framing the work
accurately.
And by that, I mean leaders are in a position where they
can explain the meaning and nature of the work that we do.
If we do high volume manufacturing of automobiles,
and we want them to be exactly the same and perfect every
time, that suggests one kind of work environment.
That suggests an environment where it's got to be
absolutely safe for people to speak up when they see
something that looks just a little off, a little wrong,
and to sort of stop and immediately figure out how to
get to the bottom of it.
If we're doing work that's in a scientific laboratory, and
we can assume that 70% of everything we try will go
wrong, will fail, then the leader's job is to make sure
everybody realizes that so that they are in a position to
make more failures more quickly than the competition
and have discovery faster.
So job one for the leader is to start with frame the work
accurately.
Tell the story of what kind of work we do and how failures
fit into that.
The second thing is embrace messengers.
Don't shoot them, embrace them.
It will never feel like a happy day when someone comes
to you and says something's wrong.
Resist the urge to get annoyed, frustrated, and take
it out on them.
Instead celebrate and thank their willingness, their
courage to come forward.
A third strategy is to set up structures and processes
through which the failures that do occur are learned from
carefully, multidisciplinary teams, systems, protocols that
help people do this well.
Because our inclination is to just do it quickly and get
back to the real work.
That is part of the real work.
SARAH GREEN: You raise an interesting point.
We're talking about what the leader can do.
But actually, as you sort of imply, it can be hard for
someone who's not a leader, or not even a manager, to bring
up bad news without feeling like a gadfly.
If you're just a sort of worker bee, how can you make
your company culture more tolerant to failure?
AMY EDMONDSON: I think you try it.
You do what you can.
As an employee in any large
organization, it won't be easy.
It will take a little bit of courage, in some cases, a lot
of courage.
But by coming forward, by raising the things that you
see or are concerned about by asking questions, by asking
for help, it can be, if you do it with enthusiasm and you do
with the intent to make things better, which many if not most
people will, it's infectious.
And your peers will do it too.
And certainly if you're in a position where you have some
people reporting to you, it makes a very real impact on
their behaviors and their assumptions.
SARAH GREEN: Well Professor Edmondson, I think that's kind
of nice note to leave it on.
Thanks again so much for coming in.
AMY EDMONDSON: Thank you for having me.
SARAH GREEN: That's Harvard Business
School's Amy Edmondson.
And the article Strategies for Learning from Failure appears
in the April, 2011 of Harvard Business Review.
For more, go to hbr.org.