Research suggests that we should encourage a growth mindset to build creativity and innovation within our environments. If that’s the case what are you doing on your team to encourage failure as a way to learn, grow, and build capacity. Here are a few ideas to help build trust by helping people become more vulnerable and willing to share failures and lessons learned.
- Hold an Idea Funeral: Holding an idea funeral is a fun way to learn from failure as a group, as Annabel Acton says in an Inc. article. Take turns eulogizing the idea or project you’re “burying,” sharing lessons learned. Focus on its merits as well as the reasons it ultimately failed. This creates a culture of trying out new ideas and learning from the results.
- Create a Fail Wall: The finance website NerdWallet creates a “Fail Wall” where mistakes are posted, emphasizing that everyone fails and honoring outside-the-box thinking. Why not set up a “Fail Wall” in your own workplace or online?
- Give a Heroic Failure Award: Advertising company Grey gives a “Heroic Failure” award to employees who take ambitious risks and go down in flames. Giving this award changes the culture of feeling shame or humiliation if a risk doesn’t pan out. Rather than letting failure become part of people’s identity, they become branded as risk-takers.
- Hold a “Failure Night”: In a popular social meetup event called “Failure Nights,” a handful of entrepreneurs tell their stories about failure, followed by a Q&A session. These events have been held in over 250 cities across 80 countries. Hold a similar event with your own people, encouraging everyone to take a turn at the mic. If it’s a hit, hold a series of them so everyone gets time to share and ask questions. Find a fun way to host the event.
- Record What You’ve Tried: Keep a track record of failures, with detailed information about what people tried. Just as a failed cancer drug proved incredibly useful for managing the AIDS virus, a past failure can become a wild success in a different context. Take notes on why the idea failed—it might succeed under the right conditions, or if certain aspects of it are revamped.
It’s most fitting to celebrate failures related to innovation, rather than execution, Harvard Business Review points out. You want to celebrate the failures that show you took a leap. If someone failed to follow through on a task, you obviously won’t want to throw a party. If they gave their all in a new project and it just didn’t achieve the desired results, that’s different. Celebrating those kinds of failures will help your people learn to fail gracefully, growing from the experience.
Most importantly, stop thinking—and talking—in terms of “win/lose.” When you eliminate the shame around failure, and show it’s okay to be vulnerable, people can talk about it. That means they can learn from it, finding the germ of a great idea within it.
Quick Examples:
- Failures from trying new technology
- Failures from trying new online team building activities
- Working from home failures
- Returning to work failures
- Pets or children taking over Zoom meetings, etc.
Information drawn from careeradvancementblog.com by Joel Garfinkle