Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy

Chapter Five

Failing Better to Succeed Faster

Teaming rarely unfolds perfectly, without any bumps, glitches, or failures. This means that the ability to learn from failure is an essential teaming skill. And although most leaders say they understand the importance of failure to the learning process, not many truly embrace it. In my research, I’ve found that even companies that have invested significant money and effort into becoming learning organizations struggle when it comes to the day-to-day mindset and activities of learning from failure. Mana­gers in these companies were highly motivated to help their organizations learn in order to avoid recurring failures and mistakes. In some cases, they and their teams had devoted many hours to after-action ...