I attended a workshop on "Learning how to Fail" a few weeks ago, which was in conjunction with 1871 CEO Betsy Ziegler and the Museum of Science and Industry's VP of HR Yolanda Stephens.
Interesting anecdote and real-life example of innovation at the MSI:
During the talk, I sat next to MSI's CFO (who used to work at Alight back when it was Hewitt - small world!), and she said that the team took on a different approach to create MSI's Wired to Wear exhibit. Typically, exhibits are created via waterfall process (one team comes up with the idea, which gets handed off to the education team, and then that is handed to marketing, etc.). This time, they took an agile approach and had everyone from finance to marketing to education all in the same room to kickstart the idea. On average, she said it takes 3-4 years to get the exhibit up and running, but Wired to Wear took only 9 months. However, financially it wasn’t performing as well and she speculated that maybe it’s because people aren’t familiar/don’t understand what to expect, or maybe the exhibit name was too subtle (compared to the more popular Pixar or LEGO exhibits, which have immediate brand name recognition.)
Here are some other notes I took away from the workshop.
How the MSI stays innovative:
Be a futurist and a provocateur (address challenges facing the world)
Kids are a large target audience, and the museum listens to what they’re concerned about:
Sustainability
Future of workforce/careers
Engaged with IDEO on MSI identity, with one of the focus being HR
On failure:
Identify failure
Create metrics around failure
Learn how to move on from failure
Create a cultural acceptance of failure
Work on multiple ideas at once:
The best organizations have ~5 ideas they’re working on at once because having only 1 puts so much pressure on that 1 idea, which usually ends up failing. When you’re working on multiple ideas that you can test out, you have a higher likelihood of positive outcome from one of those ideas
On creating new experiences/trying something new:
1st trial: be provocative (it's ok; don't be afraid! that's the only way you'll learn)
2nd trial: audience has already been exposed; they’ll less unfamiliar with experience because their comfort level has increased
How to pursue new ideas and speak on failure:
Create ideas
Create urgency (space and time) to work on ideas (this is where organizations usually break down)
Storytelling at scale: talk about what you tried, and what worked/didn’t work, and spread it to organization. If you DO fail at something, it’s important to share it so others can see that you came out of it on the other end, and there were no negative consequences in your performance management, and so others can learn from it
How to storytell @ scale?
Betsy had idea for “Best Failure Forum”, where people share fail stories and vote, and someone wins “Best Failure Award”. This encourages “productive failure”
Celebrate trials
Slack channel
Town Hall
Other tips on embracing failure in company culture:
You can’t have innovation without failure
Create a safe place to say “my plate is full” and be flexible to reprioritizing projects
Say “experiment” vs “pilot” (pilot has expectations of scalability)
No one remembers the mistake; everyone remembers how you respond to it
How to label failure: call it “failure” in your mental model so you feel the gravity of the word, but socially frame it as “what we learned”
Need to create conditions to feel safe
This starts at leadership level, and then need to fix the review system that awards and incentivizes innovation and experimentation
Performance conversation can be structured to ask “How many new things did you try?”
Why are people are risk-averse, even if innovation is the right answer for organization? Because innovation is the wrong answer for the performance review system
Betsy is working with her team to create a more accepting culture for failure and “yes, and” response to things, including a new value statement and new performance management system
Don’t always rely on best practice from the past because those are based on context and it’s from the past
Be vulnerable to failure and talk about it —> can build relationships, which is a big success
Risk management through trust. “Fail together” “be my 2nd set of eyes”
Enroll possible change-resistant people from step 1 of process to mitigate their resistance and let them feel part of the solutioning process
Confirm you are solving the right problem, and not a symptom of a problem
Divergent thinking: solve problem in multiple ways and test into them
“AMA” with teammates: build empathy from different members and understand their POV when there are disagreements
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