Learn From Failure, Don’t Run From It

Right now, someone somewhere, in a meeting room or on Zoom, is uttering these success-killing words: “We tried it before, and it didn’t work.”

Or, in a similar squash-down, “Oh, others have tried that idea, and it failed miserably.”

This is, what I call over-learning, an institutionalized defensiveness that shuts down conversation rather than opening it up. Instead, the response to an idea that bombed–in an exact or similar form–needs to be “We tried something similar, but it didn’t work, and we need to understand why.”

That deconstruction of failure is an essential, but rarely undertaken practice. There are several reasons for a corporate reluctance to engage in after-action reviews, a process that started in the Army and has migrated to other domains, including health care.

One reason for this behavior is that there are no obvious winners–only losers of varying degrees–who emerge from failure forensics. While companies talk the talk about being learning organizations and creating safe spaces for risk-taking, when was the last time you heard someone get a discretionary bonus for a flop?

Flawed decisions and their crushing outcomes are also painful emotional memories that evoke a kind of institutional and individual PTSD, which is easy to keep suppressed. Quoting Tacitus, JFK said after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, “Victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan.”

The failures that escape serious analysis are broad. Some are passive: a destructive inability to recognize a changing market environment and emerging competitive threats, for example.

But when people invoke the “We tried that before” incantation it is typically for active blunders. For example:

• Disastrous acquisitions. “We bought a small, innovative startup and we couldn’t integrate it.”
• Failed product launches. “We tried to enter the energy bar category and lost a fortune.”
• Ill-considered R and D investments. “We thought we could create a caffeine alternative, but it was impossible.” 
• Calamitous Hiring. “Remember when we tried to hire someone from a consumer business into our industry company? It was a complete mess. We’ll never do that again.” 

All of those, of course, are knee-jerk, superficial responses that require thorough, after-action analysis, which should be done as soon as failure is declared. Unfortunately, though, failure is rarely officially declared, the reality emerges gradually. That’s because the corporations over-index sunny optimism; we’ve all seen the PowerPoint presentations that glom onto two positive data points within a tornado of negative signals.

That’s a cognitive bias called the Pollyanna principle.

Over time, the company moves on, replacing careful and courageous analysis with sales-meeting-esque bromides like “Let’s look forward, not back.”  

What’s more, as time marches on, those who were around during the failure leave, and new people get hired, companies are dealing with a version of Clausewitz’s fog of war: the fog of failure–dim, tenebrous memories that are warnings without insight or direction.

Since you will no doubt be hearing the “We tried it already” excuse sometime soon–perhaps this afternoon–here are strategies for pushing the conversation to a deeper and more revealing level. Don’t be afraid to push and probe by asking:

• Was a good idea badly conceived and executed?  What went wrong could be one screaming problem–like the discontinued McDonald’s McPlant burger which left meat lovers with a decidedly non-beef taste in their mouths.

If you’re going to be the courageous leader who speaks up for a reintroducing plant-based, or cell-based meet into the Golden Arches, you better have a damn good argument that the company won’t just be repeating history.

Failure can also be, and usually is, multifactorial–a combination of positioning errors, price points, distribution mistakes, and even packaging. That requires lapidary analysis and often involves cross-functional responsibility.

Those who point out system failure don’t make many friends in the organization. 

• Was the culture not ready? Like someone once said, being too far ahead is the same as being wrong. A perfect example involves two names you probably never heard of: Rheingold Beer, a popular brewery for decades, and Gablinger’s, the first light beer that it introduced in 1967. It was a resounding failure, but in 1976 Miller Lite introduced the very same reduced-starch formula and created a multibillion-dollar category.

Be prepared to use this example when someone says that a single failure should be a permanent third rail. Start your PowerPoint with this photo.

• Was a robust tech stack lacking to support it? This is often the case with “tried that” technology products. Case-in-point, modern videoconferencing, which was first released on the Macintosh OS in 1992 and Windows in 1994.

Of course, there are many other reasons that failures–your company’s and others–should be re-examined, lest competitors, who are not burdened by overly sensitized corporate immune responses, jump into the void.

“We tried it, and it didn’t work” also often points north, to the C-suite, where a lack of patience, short-termism, and absence of executive support–a new boss enters stage left and kills the project prematurely–are all operating.

None of this is to say that we should charge in and repeat the mistakes of the past. There were a lot of smart people around the table who knew the history of Vietnam, and still believed that we could create regime change and turn Iraq and Afghanistan into the Hamptons and Malibu.

In short, understanding failure can be another way to identify opportunities or to avoid another catastrophe.

That’s why we get paid the big bucks.