Making Our Failures Intelligent

Failure is something most of us avoid at all costs. However, in Amy Edmondson's new book, The Right Kind of Wrong, she introduces the concept of intelligent failure—the idea that under the right circumstances, failure is an inevitable part of learning and innovation.

Unfortunately, many organizational cultures discourage risk-taking by overly rewarding positive outcomes and treating negative outcomes as a reason to assign blame.  

I’ve also worked with leaders who perceive even higher risks of failure—of any kind—due to their identities. One black female executive told me (paraphrasing), “I never got the ‘fail fast’ concept or understood how I could do it.” 

But even if an organizational culture does not embrace intelligent failures, there are things we can do to create space for taking risks. 

Edmondson’s description of the attributes of intelligent failures provides a roadmap. “[An intelligent failure] takes place in new territory; the context presents a credible opportunity to advance toward a desired goal [...]; it is informed by available knowledge (one might say ‘hypothesis driven’); and finally the failure is as small as it can be to still provide valuable insights. [...] A bonus attribute is that the failure’s lessons are learned and used to guide next steps.”

The first implication of that definition is that when we want to take a risk, we must do our homework to ensure that we have a hypothesis for learning that makes the risk worth it, and that we have properly scaled the experiment. 

And when we do so, it allows us to communicate our intentions. When people understand why we are conducting an experiment, it creates space to explain the results positively, even if the experiment was a failure. We can look smart even if we aren’t “successful.”

The bonus attribute of intelligent failures—that they create lessons learned—is made possible by openly describing the experiment ahead of time. When we remove the cloak of shame, we no longer have to cover up the failures. Instead, we can do something with the lessons. 

Intelligent failures are relevant as we start planning for 2024. Instead of planning only for reasonably certain or well-known territory, we can create plans to explore novel territory. It may also be easier to get these plans approved when we pair them with likely successes.  

Think: Here are five strategies that I know are winners. And here’s one more that we will experiment with because, if it’s successful, it’ll turbocharge everything else.