90 Days to Level Up Your Teamwork

Week 12Learning from Failure

Benchmark goal: Learn fast: Make the most of your failure.

In companies, learning fast is a team sport. Although individual employees learn in a casual way all the time (having new insights, improving their skills), this type of learning doesn’t automatically help the company to perform better. Individual participation in formal training programs doesn’t either. Here, we look at what it takes for organizations to systematically learn from the vast array of experiences they have—especially from failure.

Everyone agrees that people and organizations should learn from failure. And yet organizations that systematically and effectively learn from failure are very rare. This is because learning fast requires discipline. It is systematic and effortful. I explicate four steps of the learning process that underlies innovation. Of course, there are barriers to learning inherent in each of these steps, and we’ll take a look at how some companies overcome them. Finally, I give some tips for leading learning in the context of innovation.

Deliberate learning from experience starts with the right managerial mindset. I call it organizing to learn. It’s a way of thinking and acting that is driven by the recognition that the world keeps changing, and that today’s answers are almost certainly not tomorrow’s. It means not having too much (unwarranted) faith in our first round of ideas. For instance, recall the Telco DSL launch described in week 11. Senior management’s ...