When I’m often speaking with my clients I hear the words “FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION” and whilst I can concur with this principle what often gets overlooked is the fact that it is failure that leads to success. Whilst an overall intention would be for the business not to fail, the reality is that along the way there will be lots of failures – or as I prefer to call them opportunities to learn. There is nothing wrong with failure so long as the learning is taken and applied and the same error is not repeated again. Thomas Edison could have had 1,000 failures before he created the light bulb whereas he choose to re-frame that as 1,000 opportunities to learn what doesn’t work so that he could improve on this next time.
“Failure provides the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.” ~ Henry Ford
One of the challenges in business is many business cultures do not activity support the concept of failure, aka opportunities to learn, and when team members mistakenly think they they cannot fail it stifles creativity and innovation and this can lead to the business becoming stagnant and unresponsive to changes in the competitive landscape.
Recently I have been working with a group of elite leaders, who coming from the world of sport, more than others, really believe that failure is not an option and that winning is the only imperative. The challenge is that this attitude has been affecting the culture of the business and so has been hampering the innovation and creativity in their business.
The harsh fact is that businesses often fail because they don’t have a high enough degree of innovation, co-operation and collaboration. Inevitably, a competitor comes along with a superior teamwork, co-operation, collaboration and inter-dependency and eventually the less effective business is unable to compete. Take Southwest Airlines as an example. They used to be a small, inconsequential airline operator and yet today, through taking an innovative approach to their business, they have now become one of the most profitable and valuable airlines in the United States.
For business to be successful in the 21st century it is imperative that it fosters an entrepreneurial spirit amongst team members. Long term, sustainable competitive advantage is achieved through out-innovating the competition in ways that enhance efficiency and create greater value for customers. To achieve this, team members need to be unleashed and allowed to tap into their own genius. Imagine the impact if every single person working for a company were able to create and innovate. Imagine how much more intellectual capital would be available to the business, as each person would be accessing their full potential, making a real contribution and be in Flow. It would be a win-win situation for everyone.
Contrast this with the traditional control and command structures where the message to team members is typically something like, “We don’t pay you to think: we just pay you to do your job”. As a result, great opportunities to be creative and innovative are lost because the team members interfacing with the customers do not feel empowered to make decisions and challenge the status quo. Ironically, the one thing that the command and control structure seeks to achieve in fact hampers business growth as resources are not optimised and business opportunities are wasted.
Whole Foods is a great example of a company that has managed to empower their team members by creating a workplace based on love and care and that is also fun, where team members aren’t afraid and collaboration reigns. It is this release of creativity and innovation that has enabled the company to improve and evolve rapidly.
Without a collaborative culture, this innovation and creativity would have been of limited value. It is no good for one business unit to come up with a great idea and then not share it with the rest of their colleagues. A culture of collaboration enables successful ideas and innovations to be shared and spread rapidly throughout the business. The great thing is that technology can help rapidly disseminate information so new ideas can be almost instantly put into action. With even more Big Data metrics than ever before, businesses can effectively monitor and track how these new initiatives are impacting business performance.
This continual review process creates the opportunity for continual learning and improvement within the business. In this set up, business truly becomes a living system that learns, grows, evolves, self-organises – and even self-actualises – on its own. The right degree of decentralisation, empowerment, love and care in the workplace enables business to adapt, innovate and evolve faster enabling them to enjoy strong, sustainable competitive advantage.
So how are you creating a culture of innovation and creativity within your business? What systems and processes do you have in place to finely manage the balance of innovation with the need for some structure? Are you business leaders demonstrating and role modelling what innovation looks like? What are the consequences of not failing to encourage failure?
If you’d like to learn more about how to create a create a culture of innovation and collaboration then you might enjoy reading The Alchemy of Change: Ancient Wisdom Reinvented to Unleash The Hidden Potential of Leaders and Teams
Julia Felton (aka The Business Wrangler) is the founder of Business HorsePower. Business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives hire her to accelerate their business performance by harnessing the energy of their people to work more collaboratively together. By aligning purpose with actions the team achieves exponential results as everyone starts pulling in the same direction.
Julia believes that business is a force for good and through designing purpose-driven businesses that leverage the laws of nature, and the herd, you can create businesses founded on the principles of connection, collaboration and community that make a significant impact in the world.
