Intelligent Failure – And How Not to Squander Valuable Intelligence from #fails

As we are delving deeply into failure in IT and, of course, particularly ICT4D (For the unwashed, that is ‘information and communication technologies for development. Breathe), we are finding more and more smart thinkers on the topic. One is Rita McGrath who is a professor at Columbia. In a blog post today at the Harvard Business Review, she writes about intelligent failure and cautions us not to squander the valuable intelligence that failure offers.

Despite widespread recognition that challenging times place unpredictable demands on people and businesses, I still run across many managers who would prefer to avoid the logical conclusion that stems from this: failure is a lot more common in highly uncertain environments than it is in better-understood situations….

For many years, scholars such as my esteemed colleague Sim Sitkin of Duke (see his article “Learning through failure: The strategy of small losses,” ) have been studying how organizations learn, and they have come to the conclusion that intelligent failures are crucial to the process of organizational learning and sense-making. Failures show you where your assumptions are wrong. Failures demonstrate where future investment would be wasted. And failures can help you identify those among your team with the mettle to persevere and creatively change direction as opposed to pig-headedly charging blindly ahead. Further, failures are about the only way in which an organization can re-set its expectations for the future in any meaningful way.

While she addresses failure in this context from in intra-organizational perspective (useful but not sufficient) we would argue that failure must also be understood in the context of an emerging field. Mobile tech for social change and development would rather qualify as an “emerging field” where we make it up as we go along. Hence, if we keep failure bound in the confines of the organization, we, as a field and community of practice, will not learn – not intelligently or otherwise.

So, what makes intelligent failure that is a learning opportunity as opposed to wasted?  McGrath notes these characteristics of intelligent failure:

• They are carefully planned, so that when things go wrong you know why
• They are genuinely uncertain, so the outcome cannot be known ahead of time
• They are modest in scale, so that a catastrophe does not result
• They are managed quickly, so that not too much time elapses between outcome and interpretation
• Something about what is learned is familiar enough to inform other parts of the business [or field]
• Underlying assumptions are explicitly declared
• These can be tested at specific checkpoints, identified in advance, since planned results may not be equivalent to outcomes.

She asks exactly the right questions – those that we are after in conceiving FAILfaire:  “Are we genuinely reaping the benefit of the investments we’ve made in learning under uncertain conditions? Do we have mechanisms in place to benefit from our intelligent failures? And, if not, who might be taking advantage of the knowledge we are depriving ourselves of?”