Innovation? It is all about failures
Some ten years ago I remember I was watching a documentary about the Brazilian F1 driver Ayrton Senna, who died tragically in an accident during the Imola GP, 1994. Senna had been the World Champion for three times already and, despite his relatively short career, many people consider him the best F1 driver of all time (myself included).
At some point in the documentary a F1 expert was asked what made Senna such an outstanding driver. He answered that Senna, from the very first races, had no fear to commit mistakes whatsoever. As a consequence, he collected so many mistakes in the early years of his career that at some point in time there was not much left to be figured out. From there other drivers could not match him anymore, and the rest is history.
This story has a very important lesson for organizations. You should not fear committing mistakes or collecting failures along the way if you want to succeed. Unfortunately our society promotes the “avoid mistakes at all costs” mentality. Attend an MBA and I am sure you will see tons of case studies explaining “how to avoid failure” in this or that industry.
You need to pursue failure if you want to innovate and consequently to succeed. Now let me clarify this point. I do not mean you should pursue failure for the sake of failing. But rather because you can learn from failures and because it will spark new ideas. When a company fails it is necessarily trying new things, new concepts. It is challenging the status quo.
As Tom Peters argues: “It is failure, not success that makes the world go around. Because failure typically means that someone has stretched beyond the comfort zone and tried something new… and screwed it up… and learned something valuable along the way.”
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I think people try to be perfect. They do not want to start something unless they either know everything (they think anyway) or unless they won’t fail.
They forget MLB players fail 70% of the time, and are looked to as a hero. A-Rod makes 25 million a year, for only succeeding 30% of the time.
Just go for it, and stop with all of the excuses.
Great Blog!!
Mike
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[…] What if I tell you that statistically after nine failures collected you will manage to hit one success? I mean, what if the success was granted after the failures? I guess you would start trying new things and new projects like there is no tomorrow. That should be the spirit. (Some time ago I covered it in the article “Innovation? It is all about failures“) Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) just wrote a beautiful piece on the subject. In his own words: “I mention these stories because over the course of my life, every time I try something different or unlikely, someone says the equivalent of “don’t quit your day job”. When I venture into areas clearly outside of my expertise, I hear “You’re in way over your head” (…) somehow I have to square that seemingly good advice with the fact that I’ve so often been successful against long odds, especially when I’m in way over my head. In fact, that’s when I do my best work”. […]
[…] Daniel Scocco presents Innovation? It is all about failures. posted at Innovation Zen. […]
[…] From the Innovation Zen post: Some ten years ago I remember I was watching a documentary about the Brazilian F1 driver Ayrton Senna, who died tragically in an accident during the Imola GP, 1994. Senna had been the World Champion for three times already and, despite his relatively short career, many people consider him the best F1 driver of all time (myself included). […]
[…] In the second hearing lecture some sites were recommended. I looked up my notes of this hearing lecture and found the site; www.innovationzen.com. I visited the site and after looking around I found an interesting piece about innovation, which stated that innovation was all about failures. The idea of this blog is that organizations must not fear mistakes. An organization actually must collect mistakes and failures to be innovative. This does not mean that organizations just have to look for failures and mistakes, just for the sake of it. Important is that an organizations learns from the mistakes made and comes up with new ideas to improve. When an organization concludes that it makes mistakes, they are forced to come up with new ideas, so they can improve their business. The problem now a day is the world where we live in. The blogs states that the society we live in doesn’t support making mistakes. It is all about preventing failures. This is what makes the above ideas on innovation hard to implement in a lot of cases.To conclude, I found it an interesting site of view that an organization should actually make mistakes and failures to be innovative. And therefore I liked sharing it with you. If somebody want to read more or check out the site;http://innovationzen.com/blog/2006/09/18/innovation-it-is-all-about-failures/ is the place to be. The main site, www.innovationzen.com is also recommended. Hopefully you can find some other interesting thoughts on this site. […]