If At First You Don't Succeed

Image via WikipediaEvery so often Nait (Northern Alberta Institute of Technology) asks me to instruct a continuing education course for them dealing with marketing and business. This past weekend while I teaching a course on delegation and teamwork, I was reminded just how important allowing people to fail is to building trust, respect and innovation. Some companies thrive in allowing their people to fail and then learn from there failures. 3M makes it mandatory for people to fail. In their mind if they are not failing, then they are not learning and inventing new category defining products.

So back to what struck me this past weekend. I was watching with the class a DVD on the design consultancy IDEO, and a quote from one of their great talent jumped out and smacked me in the face. The quote was "enlightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius." Now I am not sure if this was his original thought or he borrowed it from some other great mind, but it quickly reminded me that people need to be encouraged to try things that scare them, things that just might not work. Too often business cultures breed stagnation and like mindedness in product design, business models and marketing communications.

In my mind the reason so little marketing activity jumps out at people and very little is differentiated and relevant, is because no learning was done it the development process. No one was encouraged to try new things and know it was ok if it didn't work because they knew they would learn from it and be even better next time. Maybe that is why I love the idea of beta sites in the webbed world. Beta sites and their thinking says we'll figure this out as we go along, some things may not work and we're fine with that because it will make the things that we do well for you become even better.

So make a mistake today and celebrate it. Then get back up and fix it so your next idea is even better.

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• Are you ready to accept failure? (ericbrown.com)