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Photo taken at Scrum Event 2018
Photo: Kirsten van Santen
Insight 1. Learn from (brilliant) failures
We humans are programmed to look at things from our own perspective. We simply have our own view of reality. And although you can get a long way, there are always things you have not taken into account. Other people, changing circumstances, unexpected influencers... unpredictability! There is often something unknown that makes things go differently than you expected.
Paul Iske is Chief Failure Officer at the Institute for Brilliant Failures and professor of Open Innovation at Maastricht University. He advocates that we think a bit more broadly. Because, as he quotes Marshall Goldsmith (aff.):
What got you here, won't get you there
In other words: you have the right to try, to fail (brilliantly) and to learn from it. Because your cycling holiday will undoubtedly not go like the picture below. All sorts of things will happen. And that's not bad, it's what makes life interesting.
It is important not to just fail a little, but to fail brilliantly. A brilliant failure is 'a well-prepared attempt to create value, but with a different outcome than planned and a learning effect'.
Criteria for brilliant failures
Source: Avanteers.nl
And that is different from the cliché that switzerland telegram data you hear in many organizations: 'making mistakes is allowed'. Because let's face it, precisely the organizations where a manager occasionally half-heartedly shouts this, are the places where employees feel that their heads will be cut off if something goes wrong.
Moreover, just saying 'it's okay to make mistakes' doesn't give you any direction on what to do with those mistakes.
Find the pattern behind the failure
In short, learning from brilliant failures can be a successful approach for organizations. And how do you do that, according to Paul Iske? By finding the essence of the failure. There are 16 archetype failures with catchy names. I will highlight 2 of them:
The Farmer's Daughter
An unusual outcome may seem like a failure at first, but on closer inspection it turns out to be valuable in a different way. I immediately think of post-its that originated at 3M. When developing a super strong adhesive, a weak adhesive was created. This seemed like a failure until someone thought that this adhesive could be used perfectly to make bookmarks with a sticky edge.
