Francesca
Gino and Bradley Staats highlight how “our traditional obsessions – success,
taking action, fitting in, and relying on experts actually undermine continuous
improvement. Virtually all leaders believe that to stay competitive, their
enterprises must learn and improve every day. But even companies revered for
their dedication to continuous learning find it difficult to always practice
what they preach. Consider Toyota: Continuous improvement is one of the pillars
of its famed business philosophy. After serious problems in late 2009 led
Toyota to recall more than 9 million vehicles worldwide, its leaders confessed
that their quest to become the world’s largest automobile producer had
compromised their devotion to learning,” (p.111-112).
If
one looks at the media these days when they report on business, everything is
short term – they aren’t interested in organisations that have a long term
view, they only seem to be interested in reporting “success” now. This in
itself has undermined how many organisations view real success, and how too
often organisations ‘sing’ to the tune of the press, terrified of even the
slightest hint of failure. But if we look back on our lives, how much did we
learn growing up through the mistakes we made. In fact wasn’t that some of the
fun of our youth – to experiment as a way to learn, where success or failure
was a positive experience to learn something from? We’re not talking about the
irresponsibility of youth – but of that pioneering spirit that lives within us
all.
To
support this thought Gino and Staats (p.112-113) ask “why do companies struggle
to become or remain ‘learning organisations? Through research conducted over
the past decade across a wide range of industries, we have drawn this
conclusion: Biases cause people to focus too much on success, take action too
quickly, try too hard to fit in, and depend too much on experts. Leaders across
organisations may say that learning comes from failure, but their actions show
a preoccupation with success. This focus is not surprising, but it is often
excessive and impedes learning by raising four challenges;
Challenge
#1: Fear of Failure. Where organisations don’t develop new capabilities or take
appropriate risks, unless managers tolerate failure and insist that it be
openly discussed.
Challenge
#2: A Fixed Mindset. People who have a fixed mindset aim to appear smart at all
costs and see failure as something to be avoided, fearing it will make them
seem incompetent.
Challenge
#3: Overreliance on Past Performance: When making hiring and promotion
decisions, leaders often put too much emphasis on performance and not enough on
potential to learn.
Challenge
#4: The Attribution Bias: It is common for people to ascribe their success to
hard work, brilliance, and skill rather than luck; however, they blame their
failure on bad fortune. This phenomenon, known as the attribution bias, hinders
learning.
Yet
the years have not been kind to risk taking and the pioneering spirit and in
today’s so called modern world the fear of failure is often learnt long before
one starts a career in business and in a sense goes against the inquisitive
nature of us human beings. Not that long ago, the men and women who pioneered
so many incredible inventions and discoveries, actually embraced failure. We
know the story of Edison and the invention of the light bulb – and just how
many attempts it took him to find the right solution. Yet one has to wonder if
Edison would ever had invented the light bulb in today’s unforgiving business
environment? But the fact that one might have to think just for a moment as to
whether Edison would have survived in today’s ‘success only’ business
environment should be cause for concern.
But
is it really external factors, like the media, that defines an organisations
cultural approach to failure or is it how their leaders respond to the external
environment and how much they believe that they control their organisations
destiny and decide to embrace failure as part of their positive culture –
rising above even their ego’s.
Gino
and Staats give this example; “consider professional soccer goalkeepers and
their strategies for defending against penalty kicks. According to a study by
Michael bar-Eli and colleagues, those goalkeepers who stay in the centre of the
goal, rather than diving to the left or the right, actually perform the best:
They have a 33.3% chance of stopping the ball. Nonetheless, goalkeepers stay in
the centre only 6.3% of the time. Why? Because it looks and feels better to
have missed the ball by diving, even if it turns out to be the wrong direction,
than to have stood still and watched the ball sail by,” (p.114).
We
live in a world where, sadly, there are too many people just waiting for
business organizations to make a mistake – it’s a quick easy story – but this
vulture like approach to failure is probably having a major detrimental impact
on the true potential progress of too many organisations around the globe.
Organisations that are spending too much time and effort worried about failure
– when it’s failures that will actually take them to the next level.
Gino
and Staats conclude by stating that “it may be cheaper and easier in the short
run to ignore failures, schedule work so that there’s no time for reflection,
require compliance with organizational norms, and turn to experts for quick
solutions. But these short-term approaches will limit the organisations ability
to learn. If leaders institute ways to counter the four biases we have
identified, they will unleash the power of learning throughout their
operations. Only then will their companies truly improve continuously, p.118
References:
Gino,
F. and Staats, B. (2015). Why Organizations Don’t Learn. Harvard Business
Review. November, p.110-118.
