Most Executives Want Innovation, Yet Don't Give Themselves or Their People, Permission to Fail - How Nuts is That?

We hear a lot of talk from most C-Suite executives about the importance of innovation to stay competitive. Such talk is part of most of their public pronouncements from press releases, to shareholder meetings, annual reports and even the executive summaries of their business plans. It is hard to imagine an all company meeting in which executives did not say something about the need for creativity and thinking outside the box as the best way to keep a competitive edge.

Even goals and objectives in most organizations have BHAG’s built in with the expectation that setting stretch goals will drive creativity and innovation – and mostly, they don’t.

How come? because most organizational culture and day-to-day practices contradict the rhetoric about the importance of creativity and innovation – and worse, it undermines the executives’ authority and the credibility and the authenticity of their organization.

Think about it – being innovative and creative implies doing things and producing outcomes that have not been produced before. It requires a discontinuity from the way we have done things in the past – a break with “the way we do things around here” – and in most organizations there is a low tolerance for that, or, more accurately, a low tolerance for the consequences of allowing widespread tinkering with established norms.

Why? because most companies and most executives are organized to get things right, to succeed in the existing context, they are not organized to fail. They don’t give themselves permission to fail.

In our day-to-day speaking we confuse failure with carelessness or incompetence. For example in the recent firing of HP’s CEO the dominant conversation is the failure of Leo Apotheker, when the real issue was, more likely, the carelessness or incompetence of the board in appointing him in the first place.

We treat failing as something bad or wrong that needs to be avoided in the future, even worse, we treat people who fail as problems – and the remedy, a negative performance review, remedial training or, as in Apotheker’s case, removal from the organization.

A necessary part of being innovative, of being creative, is that not everything we attempt will succeed as we intended – we don’t expect every experiment to work, or the result of thoughtful tinkering to be, “the next big thing”. We expect failures – or, that would be the appropriate response were it not for the way we have been trained to frame failures.

So what to do:

1. Make a clear distinction between carelessness and failure – the former the result of overlooking or neglecting to follow proven processes, protocols or procedures, a lack of due diligence; the later an attempt to do something never done before. That's why it's an experiment, trial and error, thoughtful tinkering - we want to discover what works and what doesn't
2. Acknowledge and reward those willing to experiment and tinker and fail - fear of change will reduce with each acknowledgement
3. Use each failure as a learning experience - do after action reviews regularly, institutionalize what works, eliminate what doesn't and put in place what was missing
4. Design failures in to everyone's goals and objectives – create areas/projects where you expect/want there to be failures 
5. Report on failed experiments as well as successes
6. Attract different people and care for the people you attract. "We attract a different type of person—a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe. From Steve Job's quotes
7. Eliminate anything that is abusive to the human spirit – gossiping, undermining, sarcasm, agreeing/counter-arguing, intimidation...
8. Finally, be really, really, really clear what the organization's purpose and values are and live them - live them boldly, and with passion.