Business consultant and strategist Stuart Cross writes that
in the time since he left the corporate world and started his own
consulting business, the biggest single lesson he has learnt, is the need to
accept and embrace failure.
He does not mean failing at everyday operations – clients
wouldn’t pay for that and the business wouldn’t last very long. What he is
referring to is the willingness to fail when he trying to develop something
new.
He has found to be a lesson that takes a long time to learn,
but the demands of selling his services have shown the following:
If he demands 100 per cent success then he’s very
unlikely to do anything interesting or worthwhile. If he puts pressure on
himself to ‘get it right first time, every time’, he ends up planning and
planning, rather than taking action.
In fact, failure is at the heart of all progress. As Woody
Allen once said, “If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re
not doing anything very innovative.”
Yet, Cross says, many large corporations detest failure. In
the minds of large company executives it’s a word that brings to mind images of
a P45 and a black bin bag of hastily collected office belongings. For many
companies, the desire to protect current business overwhelms any wish to
radically change their customer offer or business model.
As we see all the time, the breakthrough innovations are
driven by new entrants and upstarts with nothing to lose. He sites examples
such as Ryanair and EasyJet. It was they, not BA or Lufthansa, which
transformed the European airline market. Similarly, Google rather than
Microsoft has transformed the way we use the web, and, going back 30 years, it
was Microsoft that acted as the catalyst for the explosion in our use of PCs.
So why isn’t getting better at failing at the top of many
senior executives’ list of objectives for 2010? And how can they adopt more of
the risk-seeking attitudes and approaches of start-ups?
During a roundtable discussion of strategy officers from
some of the UK’s leading companies, Cross notes that the collective view was
that the key for large companies to innovate better was for them to be willing
and able to fail more quickly and cheaply than they currently do.
Instead of relying on detailed analysis and research, in a
vain and futile attempt for the initial version to be perfect, it is faster and
more effective to create and test a simple prototype for an idea. It shouldn’t
cost a lot of money – in fact, the cheaper the better, usually – and although
it won’t be perfect, it will help establish whether the idea has ‘legs’ or is a
‘dog’.
In other words, by starting to behave more like a cash-strapped new-start company, focusing on creating a series of straightforward but ever-improving prototypes rather than an ideal one-off solution, large companies can become faster, more agile and, ultimately, more innovative.
Image: Banksy
