Is it really so good to fail?
(By John Atkinson)
Fail fast fail often, learn a new route through. That is the mantra that now accompanies most Change. We are encouraging failure, embracing it, enthused about its possibilities. This comes from a good biological model of adaptation where each successful adaptation is just one of a myriad of others that largely failed and died out. So it seems a bright and sensible thing to do.
But we are what we do, not what we say we do. We can say we embrace experimentation and encourage failure but if all the examples of our response to failure are punitive then nobody dares. The NHS in England for example has people encouraging failure whilst at the same time the organisational consequences are heavy. In one part of the health system I’m working in currently more than half the senior team are on ‘sick leave’ as the hospital struggles with the discrepancies in its financial model and quality issues. This is not an isolated case.
By punishing failure it becomes really easy to keep things largely as they are. The present system acts to preserve its own identity. We keep the same people in the same job roles delivering the same service, albeit they may move from organisation to organisation. So we need to match rhetoric with reality. If the senior team cannot be seen to takes risks and fail, admit its errors, be open about experimenting with things it doesn’t know how to do then the clear message it gives to the organisation is forget the rhetoric, play it safe and cover up for your mistakes.
Is it any wonder things tend to stay largely as they are?