Rita McGrath

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 <h4 class="ideainbrief-title">The Idea in Brief</h4>
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 If you’re launching a new business, creating a new product, or developing a new technology, the principles of intelligent failure provide both logic and a safety net.
 Decide what you’re trying to do and what success would look like.
 Be explicit about the assumptions you’re making and have a plan for testing them throughout the project.
 Design the initiative in small chunks so that you learn fast, without spending too much money. Don’t try to learn more than one significant thing at a time.
 Create a culture that shares, forgives, and sometimes even celebrates failure.
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</article-ideainbrief>It’s hardly news that business leaders work in increasingly uncertain environments. Nor will it surprise anyone that under uncertain conditions, failures are more common than successes. And yet, strangely, we don’t design organizations to manage, mitigate, and learn from failures. When I ask executives how effective their organizations are at learning from failure, on a scale of one to 10, I often get a sheepish “Two—or maybe three” in response. As this suggests, most organizations are profoundly biased against failure and make no systematic effort to study it. Executives hide mistakes or pretend they were always part of the master plan. Failures become undiscussable, and people grow so afraid of hurting their career prospects that they eventually stop taking risks.

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Reprint: R1104E
It&#8217;s hardly news that business leaders work in increasingly uncertain environments, where failures are bound to be more common than successes. Yet if you ask executives how well, on a scale of one to 10, their organizations learn from failure, you&#8217;ll often get a sheepish &#8220;Two&#8212;or maybe three&#8221; in response. Such organizations are missing a big opportunity: Failure may be inevitable but, if managed well, can be very useful. A certain amount of failure can help you keep your options open, find out what doesn&#8217;t work, create the conditions to attract resources and attention, make room for new leaders, and develop intuition and skill. 
The key to reaping these benefits is to foster &#8220;intelligent failure&#8221; throughout your organization. McGrath describes several principles that can help you put intelligent failure to work. You should decide what success and failure would look like before you start a project. Document your initial assumptions, test and revise them as you go, and convert them into knowledge. Fail fast&#8212;the longer something takes, the less you&#8217;ll learn&#8212;and fail cheaply, to contain your downside risk. Limit the number of uncertainties in new projects, and build a culture that tolerates, and sometimes even celebrates, failure. Finally, codify and share what you learn.
These principles won&#8217;t give you a means of avoiding all failures down the road&#8212;that&#8217;s simply not realistic. They will help you use small losses to attain bigger wins over time.

Failing by Design

Reprint: R1104E It’s hardly news that business leaders work in increasingly uncertain environments, where failures are bound to be more common than successes. Yet if you ask executives how well, on a scale of one to 10, their organizations learn from failure, you’ll often get a sheepish “Two—or maybe three” in response. Such organizations are missing a big opportunity: Failure may be inevitable but, if managed well, can be very useful. A certain amount of failure can help you keep your options open, find out what doesn’t work, create the conditions to attract resources and attention, make room for new leaders, and develop intuition and skill. The key to reaping these benefits is to foster “intelligent failure” throughout your organization. McGrath describes several principles that can help you put intelligent failure to work. You should decide what success and failure would look like before you start a project. Document your initial assumptions, test and revise them as you go, and convert them into knowledge. Fail fast—the longer something takes, the less you’ll learn—and fail cheaply, to contain your downside risk. Limit the number of uncertainties in new projects, and build a culture that tolerates, and sometimes even celebrates, failure. Finally, codify and share what you learn. These principles won’t give you a means of avoiding all failures down the road—that’s simply not realistic. They will help you use small losses to attain bigger wins over time.

Failing by Design

Summary.

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