Learning the hard way

Two university business professors have completed a study that indicates that organizations that consciously learn from their failures may do better than those that commonly succeed – and thus feel no compulsion to learn and improve.

This doesn't mean business leaders should try to fail. But it does suggest that you embrace failures as key learning opportunities, rather than shameful mistakes to cover up and never speak of again.

Researchers Vinit Desai and Peter Madsen focused their study on organizations that launch satellites and rockets into space. Reviewing 4,600 launches from 1957 to 2004, they found that organizations that experienced failures were less likely to suffer subsequent failures than companies that had no failures on record.

Example: During a 2002 flight of the space shuttle Atlantis, a piece of insulation broke off and damaged a rocket booster. But the miscue didn't affect the mission, so it was mainly ignored.

You know what came next. In 2003 the shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry to earth, killing its crew of seven, after a broken chunk of insulation struck the left wing. The disaster prompted a major investigation resulting in 29 recommended changes to prevent future calamities.

According to Desai, the difference in response, and the life-savings learnings that resulted, stemmed from the Atlantis flight being considered a success and the Challenger’s a failure. “Whenever you have a failure it causes a company to search for solutions,” says Desai. “And when you search for solutions it puts you as an executive in a different mindset, a more open mindset.”

Desai also noted that “knowledge gained from success was often fleeting, while knowledge from failure stuck around for years."

If all this sounds self-evident, Desai notes that many companies don't even try to learn from mistakes. "Managers may fire people or turn over the entire workforce while they should be treating the failure as a learning opportunity."

But don't go inviting trouble. Desai advises organizations to analyze their small failures for useful information rather than wait for major setbacks.

I recently read the same thought expressed in a very different context. In his writings from prison following World War II Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister and logistics genius, opined that the seeds of Germany’s defeat were sown in the ease with which it overran most of Europe in the early 1940s. The resulting sense of infallibility, said Speer, prevented the German leadership from taking their future challenges seriously – while the hard-pressed Allies fought back in fear and desperation.

The moral: Easy wins aren’t good business. It’s in the heat of battle that you discover your weaknesses and develop your true strengths.