As Woody Allen once said: “if you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative”. Woody is as creative as they come. But it wasn’t creativity alone that made him a film director, writer, actor, jazz musician, comedian and playwright. It was innovation; the process of turning creative new ideas into successful realities.
Innovation is oft described as a loser’s game, because new initiatives often fail. The trick, they say, is accepting and managing failure as a part of the innovation process. And when you fail, fail quickly.
Accept it
Failure is not good, but there is good in failure. Learning from failure can help make future innovations stronger. And for innovation’s sake, trying and failing is sometimes better than not trying at all.
Failure can be managed and thus minimised, but success is never guaranteed. Failure is therefore an intrinsic feature of innovation. Innovators should accept failure, and take value from it.
Manage it
Acceptance of failure does not mean failure should be welcomed. Big business may swallow the cost of failure, but the rest of us need to keep mistakes to a minimum - if only to survive. One of the biggest challenges for creative individuals and businesses is deciding which new ideas are most likely to succeed, and thus which ideas should be devoted time and resources.
Harold Sirkin, co-author of ‘Payback’, a book on innovation strategy, argues that “firms have too many ideas and too much emphasis on creativity - more ideas merely choke the funnel even more”.
Having too many ideas is not necessarily a problem, unless their development leads to too much failure. It’s therefore crucial to manage failure like any other risk. The transition from creativity to innovation (idea generation to implementation) is something to be closely managed.
For businesses, effective communication, leadership and decision-making help control and filter new ideas. For the lone individual, the filtering process may simply mean being pragmatic about how much time can be spent ‘chocking the funnel’ with new ideas. Either way, managing the move from conception of creative idea to innovative implementation helps avoid countless and costly dead ends.
Do it quickly
If you accept failure but manage it to the point that it never happens, you are either incredibly successful, or you are pursuing fewer new ideas. That could ultimately stifle innovation. A happy middle ground: fail, but fail quickly. This approach lets individuals and businesses try new things, without losing too much time or money if things go wrong.
The problem: an innovator with a new idea can be like a dog with a bone. It’s sometimes difficult to let go. Niklas Savander, an executive vice president at Nokia, argues that innovators “need really harsh discipline to weed out ideas quite quickly”, and explains that Nokia “are working at fast failing, but are not there yet”. Failing fast is a challenge for even the biggest firms (and arguably, it’s easier for smaller, more agile entities).
Interestingly, the need to fail quickly brings us back to the need to accept failure in the first place. If failure is a dirty word, it’s going to be less easy to do quickly and comfortably. If it’s accepted as part of the innovation process, the act of giving up, learning from one’s mistakes and moving on becomes a less bitter pill to swallow.
Related resources - The business case for innovation
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