Page 181 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

170 HBR Leader’s Handbook

Encourage controlled failure
Whatever your approach to innovation, you and your organization must be
willing to learn from failure. Failure is a necessary component of learning.
If organizations don’t sometimes try things that are risky and have a higher
than usual chance of failure, they can never create new forms of value.
However, most organizations (and, in fact, most people) avoid taking on
risk because they don’t want to fail or suffer the public shame of doing so.
We’ve all been taught that failure is bad. And it certainly can have career
consequences or financial implications. But as you build your innovation
process, you must build it in such a way that it allows failures to happen, in
controlled ways, and to leverage what those failures can teach you.
As an example, one of Thomson Reuters’s innovation champions, Bob
Schukai, was an early tester of Google Glass (a device developed to dis- play
hands-free information on the lenses). Schukai and his team devel- oped
an application that would allow law enforcement officers to rapidly access
information on their glasses at traffic stops. When Google stopped its Glass
project, the application died with it. But its development had helped
Thomson Reuters better understand information needs in the pub- lic
sector, gain familiarity with public databases, and address privacy and
safety concerns that it could use in various other projects. As innovation
leader Manuel reflects, “The Google Glass project may not have ended with
a multimillion-dollar revenue stream for us, but it sent a powerful message
to all of our employees that innovation is alive and well.”
To encourage failure in a controlled way, find opportunities for lean
testing of initiatives like those described, in which concepts and assump-
tions are tested incrementally and thus with less risk. We’ve also seen this
in action in the results practice we described in chapter 4, in the rapid
experimentation exercises Seraina Macia led to get her team to reach the
high goals she had set. Other experiments can be even more lightweight—
in a “painted door” test, for example, a company advertises a product on
the web to measure customer interest before it actually builds it. Inter-
ested users who click on the image get a message asking for their email so
they can be notified when the product is ready or if they want to participate