“Success Is Going from Failure to Failure Without Losing Your Enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
Where does innovation come from, it comes from:
- people who do not accept the way things are,
- people who want more than they have now,
- challenging ideas and pushing limits,
- questioning thoughts, and procedures;
- mistakes and can be an unintended consequence or an accident;
- a carefully planned and executed process building on all those who came before us.
Does innovation happen a lot?
I suspect not as much as it should, even in companies that might think that they are forward thinking, everyone has “blind spots.”
Does everyone support innovative thinking?
Publicly most businesses do; however, in practice my experience has been that most people will to a point, but then everyone has “sacred protected things” that are “untouchable.” To improve, we should look at everything with an open mind.
Do most companies encourage risk taking?
The ones that are growing and have consistently grown over the years, will have some of that, the tendency unfortunately is to “forget” some of the things that created the success, particularly as companies go through a generational shift from the original entrepreneur to their children, who may lack the “up close and personal” knowledge of just how close the company came to failing in the early days.
Sometimes companies can lose their “competitive advantages or edges,” by also forgetting the things that made them a success; for example, as successful as Apple Computers were, they essentially fired perhaps the most visionary industrial person in the past 50 years when they got rid of the Steve Jobs. If it happened to them, it can happen to all of us.
How to most companies deal with failure?
Responsibility and accountability are great things. Examine your own company and your own responses to when failures happen in your life and in your professional life. You may find that you punish failures more than you encourage and support the person who may have failed and you can crush their spirit even though they may have just missed succeeding. I know I have been guilty of that, and being aware of an issue, is one of the first steps of making sure it doesn’t happen again.
How to move forward?
I know I am asking lots of simple questions and life is much more complicated than I am allowing for, so lets eliminate the possible “criminal” risks, and lets say that for every opportunity to take a business risk, we have a process in place to ensure that there are some checks and balances so that we encourage “free thinking” and “fluid development” without necessarily bankrupting the company.
Have your heard your people say the following:
- “We’ve already tried that …”
- “It doesn’t work or that won’t work”
- “Nobody else is doing that”
- “Don’t bother suggesting anything, nothing ever changes”
- “That’s not my job”
- “That isn’t my decision”
- “What if it doesn’t work?”
- “Who’s going to take the blame for that?”
- “Last time I suggested something, they took my head off”
- “We have been doing this for a long time, it works”
- “Why should we change?”
- “You decide, you are the manager”
As a company, if you are an owner do you feel that you are the smartest one in the room all the time; do you feel that way as a manager; as an associate do you fight change because it threatens your comfort zone or your place in the pecking order.
How many people really embrace change? It is easy to say you support change when it doesn’t affect you. How adaptable are you really? I suspect, like me, it is something that we could all use a little work on.
I believe that I am a good leader and a good manager; but I know I could be better, much better. It seems the more I learn the more I realize how little I actually know.
Successful organizations, encourage and foster innovation in a number of ways:
- They appreciate that they do not have a monopoly on good ideas
- They realize that growth comes from evolution and incremental improvement to greater or lesser extent depending on what is happening in the market place. For example, COVID-19 has created an evolution/revolution in some aspects how we do business; but, at the same time incremental improvement still has a role to play.
- They encourage new ideas and a fresh approach to old ideas, even ones that didn’t work the first, second, or third times they were tried.
- They appreciate that a fresh perspective might push an old failed idea over the top.
- They know that people might be in the wrong job, but in a different seat they might make a huge difference.
- They do “extra”, they do more than everyone else and always more than was expected.
- They understand that nothing is necessarily outside of their job description if it helps build the company.
- They believe that whatever they are doing, whenever they are doing it, is adding value to the company.
- They praise people for making suggestions and have methods of rewarding new ideas and fresh approaches.
- They never assign blame to someone who tries a concept and has it fail.
- They always look at “what did they do right? What did they do wrong? And what could they do better next time?
- No matter what the difficulty or obstacle, they are always looking for ways to do what they can, even if it is not a perfect solution or fit.
- They know that if they don’t constantly look at doing things better, that their competition will.
- They celebrate the BOLD, the RISK TAKERS, and THE FAILURE’S who always try to make things better for the organization, not simply for themselves.
- They populate their organizations with the best people they can find with Integrity, Passion, and Enthusiasm, understanding that in many ways, their associates will be better than they are doing any particular function in the company.
- They support people who make decisions, give them the praise when it works publicly, and they support both publicly and privately if it fails.
- They understand “checks and balances” and make decisions after examining the facts, looking at alternatives, and then making the best decisions they can, whether they have 30 seconds to make a decision or 30 days.
- They are nimble, able to adapt, and able to improvise.
I know I can do better at these things, I used to believe that part of my job was to prevent mistakes from happening and that is still partially true; however, a bigger part of my job is to facilitate growth and innovation by allowing my associates to grow, to innovate, to have success, and even sometimes to fail and learn how to come back from those failures without any loss of enthusiasm with even better solutions, knowledge, and experience.