Tag Archives: failure

Celebrating Failure Via Lessons in Organizational Culture

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations striving for innovation and transformation must foster a culture that embraces failure as a stepping stone to success. Failure is often stigmatized, yet it serves as one of the most potent learning tools available. By celebrating failure and extracting valuable lessons, organizations can adapt, grow, and build resilience.

Understanding the Value of Failure

Failure provides insights that success cannot. It highlights weaknesses in processes, gaps in knowledge, and areas for improvement. A culture that perceives failure as an opportunity rather than a setback encourages experimentation and bold ideas, paving the way for groundbreaking innovation.

Case Study #1: Pixar Animation Studios

The Journey of “Toy Story 2”

Pixar Animation Studios is renowned for its creative brilliance, yet even such an innovative company has faced significant challenges, most notably with the production of “Toy Story 2.” What began as a direct-to-video sequel turned into a major theatrical release, overwhelming the original project plan.

During production, a near-fatal data loss almost wiped out the entire film. The project was saved by a single employee who had a backup copy on her home computer, but the incident forced the team to reflect deeply on their processes and assumptions.

In response, Pixar embraced a culture of reviewing failures openly, investing in better data resilience and project management strategies. By turning this major setback into a learning moment, Pixar transformed its production approach, enhancing communication and collaboration across teams.

Case Study #2: Tata Group

The Nano Car Failure

Tata Motors, part of the Tata Group, launched the Tata Nano in 2008 with great anticipation. Positioned as the world’s cheapest car, the Nano was expected to revolutionize the Indian automotive market.

However, the car failed to meet sales expectations due to design flaws, marketing missteps, and a mismatch with consumer perceptions. Rather than viewing the Nano as a defeat, Tata leveraged its lessons learned to enhance market research processes and product development strategies.

The company has since implemented customer-focused design principles and improved stakeholder engagement in new projects, learning from the mistakes and challenges faced with the Nano.

Principles for Cultivating a Culture that Celebrates Failure

1. Establish Psychological Safety

Employees must feel safe to take risks without fear of judgment or reprisal. Encouraging open dialogue about mistakes and the insights gained from them is crucial for fostering psychological safety.

2. Encourage Experimentation

Create an environment where experimentation is not only allowed but encouraged. Allocate resources and time for innovation projects, and celebrate the learning that comes from both successes and failures.

3. Learn and Iterate

After a failure, conduct a thorough analysis to understand what went wrong and why. Use this information to iterate and improve processes. Document these lessons so future teams can benefit from past experiences.

Conclusion

By embracing failure and integrating its lessons into the organizational fabric, companies unlock pathways to innovation and long-term success. Celebrating failure as a learning opportunity rather than a defeat cultivates a resilient and forward-thinking workplace culture.

In a world where change is the only constant, let us actively seek out and learn from failures, transforming them into stepping stones for future achievements.

Extra Extra: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Pexels

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How to Write a Failure Resume

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How to Write a Failure Resume

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers, M.D.

Most resumes are designed to help you find a job, get a promotion or as part of a grant submission or other way to find money. Much like an academic CV, they enumerate your multiple accomplishments, track your professional progress and contributions and , typically, spin or conceal your failures. In the worst case, you lie about them. Here are some common ones and how to spot them.

There certainly is value in celebrating your successes and positive feedback. I mean, who doesn’t like a pat on the back or an attaboy? Do you have a personal highlight reel?

However, the flip side of the coin is you should do the same for your failures. You might want to start with that team you captained as a kid that didn’t win a game all season.

Flame outs are common, even to rising stars. Here are reasons and ways to prevent it.

Medical students and other overacheivers, for example, are not used to failure.

Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity under conditions of uncertainty with the goal of creating user defined value through the deployment of innovation using a VAST business model. During my career, I have attempted to do that in many ways wearing many hats such as a small business owner (private pratice), a technopreneur (creating medical devices), an intrapreneur (trying to add value to my organization as an employee), a social entrepreneur (creating a non-profit), a service provider (working as a consultant and advisor), a physician investor (having a financial interest in companies and helping to raise money for them) and an edupreneur (creating academic programs, working with mededtech companies and serving on editorial boards and medical information sites.) Sometimes, I succeeded. Most of the time I’ve failed…in some instances, miserably.

I started 3 medical device companies and many other organizational initiatives. One is still sitting in IP purgatory. The others I buried long ago. Some actually saw the light of day and continue to scale.

We pulled the plug on a digital health company, Medvoy, I cofounded. Here’s what I learned.

Since entrepreneurship is 1) a high risk endeavor, 2) not formally taught in medical education programs and 3) learned from mistakes requiring skin in the game, a part of your resume should include your failures as well as your successes. It’s just more honest, exposes your vulnerabilities and builds trust.

Many people would ask why you need a failure resume to know your failures? The answer is when you know your failure as a setback in your life, it leave a great impact on your personal and professional life. In addition, it makes you more “human” since we all fail and paints a richer picture of your journey of who you and how you coped with adversity. It is a measure of resilience, grit and perseverance.

A hybrid success-failure resume is a combination of the 1)good, the bad, the ugly 2) lessons learned and 3) future plans

The Good: All the fluff, rewards and accomplishments in your present resume

The Bad: Minor setbacks, disappointments and failures such as jobs you didn’t get, applications rejected, promotions denied, papers or submissions trashed, lousy grades, substandard clinical or teaching evaluations or poor performance evaluations

The Ugly: These are more major setbacks like getting fired, disciplinary actions or suspensions, tanking your last three companies or being convicted of a felony

Lessons learned: This is where you give an honest answer instead of the BS you spout when asked, “What is your biggest weakness?”

Future plans: Explain how you took personal responsibility for your screw ups and why I should bet on you if I’m an investor looking for the right jockey or an employer lookng for talent.

It’s hardly news that business leaders work in increasingly uncertain environments, where failures are bound to be more common than successes. Yet if you ask executives how well, on a scale of one to 10, their organizations learn from failure, you’ll often get a sheepish “Two—or maybe three” in response. Such organizations are missing a big opportunity: Failure may be inevitable but, if managed well, can be very useful. A certain amount of failure can help you keep your options open, find out what doesn’t work, create the conditions to attract resources and attention, make room for new leaders, and develop intuition and skill.

The key to reaping these benefits is to foster “intelligent failure” throughout your organization. McGrath describes several principles that can help you put intelligent failure to work. You should decide what success and failure would look like before you start a project. Document your initial assumptions, test and revise them as you go, and convert them into knowledge. Fail fast—the longer something takes, the less you’ll learn—and fail cheaply, to contain your downside risk. Limit the number of uncertainties in new projects, and build a culture that tolerates, and sometimes even celebrates, failure. Finally, codify and share what you learn.

These principles won’t give you a means of avoiding all failures down the road—that’s simply not realistic. They will help you use small losses to attain bigger wins over time.

Another part of your failure resume should include gaps. What were you doing between January 2019 and March 2020 anyway? Here are some tips on how to tell your side of the story.

Maybe some day hiring managers will accept the answer, “I took a gap year to get my head screwed on”. But, for now, don’t count on it.

The renowned historian Arnold Toynbee famously quipped, “Nothing fails like success when you rely on it too much.” We may have entered a world in which nothing succeeds like failures, especially if you are honest about them. Indeed, the very last entry in Johannes Haushofer’s list of setbacks is what he called his Meta-Failure: “This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work.”

Here is what to do when your white coat gets the pink slip and some advice on explaining to the next person that you were let go.

Part of being an entrepreneur is knowing when to say no and when to pull the plug…and learn and take personal responsibility for your failure.

There is nothing wrong with giving up on a project or a dream. Stuff happens. Luck has a lot do with your success. The system is rigged.

To be happy, make it personal but don’t take it personally. Know when to quit something, Just don’t give up on yourself. The best time to fail fast and fail often is when you are young. Time is on your side, although , contrary to the saying, it won’t heal all wounds.. Take advantage of the time value of failure.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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Disrupt Yourself, Your Team and Your Organization

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Disrupt Yourself, Your Team and Your Organization

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Moving into a new year is always a time for retreating and reflecting to accelerate growth and harvest new ideas from our feelings, thoughts, and learnings gleaned from the last two years of disruption, extreme uncertainty, and instability. Whether you are actively seeking to disrupt yourself, your team, and your organization to effect sustainable success this year, or not, we all have the opportunity to adapt, innovate and grow from the range of challenging events that impacted us in the past 24 months. This is why it might be useful to see these disruptive events as positive, powerful, and impactful forces for creating new cracks in your own, or your team or organizational soil – to sow some imaginative, creative, and inventive seeds for effecting positive change in an unstable world.

To see them germinate the desired changes you want for yourself, your team, and organization and deliver them, to survive and thrive in 2022.

We are all being challenged by disruption

Our status quo and concepts of business-as-usual have all been significantly disrupted, resulting in a range and series of deep neurological shocks, that have shaken many of us, our teams, and our organizations, to our very cores. Some of us adapted to a sense of urgency and exploited the opportunity to reinvent, iterate, or pivot our teams and organizations, towards co-creating individual and intentional “new normals” and just “got on” with it. Some of us have continually denied, defended, and avoided making changes, where many of us have sunk deeply into our fears and anxieties, falsely believing that our lives, and our work, would eventually go back to “normal”.

This is because a significant number of our habitual, largely unconscious mental models and emotional states, were disrupted, largely by events beyond our individual and collective control. Causing many of us to experience “cognitive dissonance” (a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors that produce feelings of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance) from the chaos, discomfort, confusion, and conflict.

Which saw many of us, disconnect cognitively and emotionally, from the current disruptive reality, where some of us secretly hoped that “it will all go away” manifesting and festering fundamentally and unconsciously, as inherent neurological immobility, (freeze, fight, flight) resulting in many areas as resistance to change.

Why disrupt yourself, your team, and organization?

Yet disruptive change is inevitable, the speed and pace of exponential change cannot be stopped, the range of complex and wicked global and local problems that need to be solved collectively, aren’t going away.

Job security and full-time employment, as hybrid and virtual work, and technology accelerate, are becoming “things of the past” as the workplace continues to destabilize through digitization, AI, and automation.

Whilst the war for talent also accelerates as the great resignation sets in and people make powerful, empowered life balance decisions and are on the move globally.

Taking the first steps to disrupt yourself, your team, and organization

In this time of extreme uncertainty, we have a unique moment in time, to disrupt ourselves, teams, and organizations by:

Hitting our individual, collective mental, and emotional pause buttons, to retreat from our business-as-usual activities, and take time out to reflect upon paying attention and qualifying:

How specifically have I/we been disrupted?
How have our people, teams, and customers been disrupted?
What are some of the major collective impacts on our organization’s current status and how might these impact our future growth potential and overall sustainability?
How connected are we to an exponential world, how can we ensure that our feelings, thoughts, and actions, connect with what is really happening to us, our teams, and our customers?
What causes disconnection and how might we manage it to be more mentally tough and emotionally agile in an extremely uncertain future?
What really matters to us, our teams, organizations, and customers – what do our people, teams, and customers really want from us?
What are some of the key elements of our organizational strategy to enact our purpose and deliver our mission?

Generating safe, evocative, provocative, and creative conversations, that evoke deep listening and deep questioning, about how to individually and collectively reconnect, revitalize, rejuvenate and reenergize people, teams and organizations to survive and thrive through asking:

How can we engage and harness our people and teams’ energies in ways that mobilize their collective intelligence to evoke new mindset shifts and new ways of thinking and acting?
What are some of the key mindsets and traits we need to disrupt, shift, and cultivate to be successful to adapt and grow through disruption?
What skills do our leaders and teams need to learn to think and act differently to shift the organizations culture to deliver our strategy?
How might we shift our teams and organizations to be agile, and redesign our organizations for both stability and speed?
What does it mean to us, our teams, and organizations to be creative, inventive, and innovative – How might we shift our teams and organizations to be more creative, inventive, and innovative?
What are the new behavioral norms that will support and enable us to execute agile and innovative changes?
How might becoming agile and innovative help our people, teams co-create a healthy, high-performing, and sustainable organizational culture?
How might becoming agile and innovative add value to the quality of people’s lives and help our customers flourish?

Becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable by developing our peoples, teams, and our organizational “discomfort resilience” and dance of the edge of your comfort zones through:

Creating safe environments where people and teams are allowed to experiment, have permission, and are trusted to practice, make mistakes as they move through difficult emotions, and take little bets in low stake situations.
Intentionally breaking organizational routines and habits, to create space in people’s brains for new neural pathways to be developed.
Enabling people and teams to become mindful of their triggers, to interrupt their automatic reactions.
Equipping people and teams to thoughtfully and intentionally respond to situations, that make them uncomfortable and risk-averse, by knowing how to think differently.
Bringing more play into the way people work, encourages people to be imaginative, inquisitive, curious, and improvisational, to seek different ways of thinking and acting, that really make a difference in how work gets done.
Support people and teams to learn by doing, and failing fast, without the fear of blame, shame, and retribution, despite it being risky to do that.

Why not disrupt yourself, your team, and organization?

The future is going to be full of disruptive events and circumstances that will impact is our families, communities, team, and organizations, and the conditions of extreme uncertainty and disruption are not going to go away. In fact, they are fundamental to what might be described as our collective “new normal” and it’s up to you to disrupt yourself, your team, and organization, to lead, adapt and grow, to survive and thrive through it.

Find out about The Coach for Innovators Certified Program, a collaborative, intimate, and deep personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 8-weeks, starting May 2022. It is a blended learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of a human-centered approach to innovation, within your unique context. Find out more.

Contact us now at mailto:janet@imaginenation.com.au to find out how we can partner with you to learn, adapt, and grow your business, team and organization through disruption.

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Embracing Failure – Lessons Learned from Setbacks

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Embracing Failure - Lessons Learned from Setbacks

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the world of innovation, failure is not just inevitable, it’s essential. Embracing failure can lead to groundbreaking discoveries, foster resilience, and cultivate a culture that thrives on learning. While the stigma of failure persists, forward-thinking organizations understand that embracing setbacks is a cornerstone of progress. Here, we explore two compelling case studies that illustrate how failure can be transformed into a stepping stone for future success.

Case Study 1: The Rise of Airbnb

When Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia first conceived the idea of renting out air mattresses on their apartment floor, their concept wasn’t an overnight sensation. The fledgling platform struggled, with its initial website launch garnering disappointing engagement. The duo faced numerous rejections from investors, many of whom doubted the viability of the idea. However, rather than viewing these setbacks as failures, the team saw them as opportunities to refine their model and focus on user experience.

Lessons Learned:

Pivoting is powerful: Chesky and Gebbia used feedback from failures to adapt their business model, eventually redefining the travel and lodging industry.
Persistence is key: Despite numerous rejections, they persisted, displaying resilience that would eventually lead to Airbnb’s global success.

Case Study 2: The WD-40 Story

WD-40, now a staple in households worldwide, originated from a series of failures. The product’s creation was the result of 39 unsuccessful attempts to develop a formula to prevent corrosion. Instead of seeing these failed attempts as a loss, the creators viewed each one as a learning opportunity. The breakthrough came with the 40th formula, hence the name “WD-40” which stands for “Water Displacement, 40th formula”.

Lessons Learned:

Learning from repetition: Every failed attempt provided valuable data, ultimately leading to a successful product.
Failure can fortify determination: The triple-digit number of attempts underscores how determination can lead to ultimate success.

Conclusion

Both of these stories demonstrate that failure is not the opposite of success; it is part of its journey. Organizations willing to embrace failure cultivate a learning culture, fostering innovation and improvement. Embracing failure also sets the stage for transformational change as each setback provides the chance to learn, innovate, and ultimately succeed.

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Everyone hates to fail, why do you?

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Everyone hates to fail, why do you?

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

If you have ever had a significant setback, made a serious mistake, or failed at completing an important task, you will have experienced some kind of deep emotional and visceral, largely unconscious, negative, reactive response to it.

By becoming passively or aggressively externally defensive and blaming and punishing others for the outcome, or by withdrawing internally, and attributing self-blame and self-punishment for what may have happened.

Everyone hates to fail because either type of reactive response stings and causes discomfort, dissonance, sorrow, suffering, and pain since you are feeling ashamed, judged, and shamed by yourself and by others. We need to re-think how we approach and digest failure, to scale and leverage it as one of our 21st-century superpowers.

Sabotaging your chances of success

According to a recent article in Psychology Today, this reactive response triggers your avoidance motivation, which then often exceeds your motivation to succeed!

Describing that the fear of failure causes us to then unconsciously sabotage our chances of success, as well as our ability to cultivate and manifest the superpowers necessary to thrive in the 21^st century.

Self-doubt settles us into a denying the need to experiment, and a reluctance, full of excuses, to experiment further with adopting, iterating, and testing new and novel ideas. Or in taking smart risks, that help you connect, explore and discover and design opportunities for making important and necessary, personal and professional changes.

Pivot and adapt to disruptive events

Yet, our ability to experiment, test, validate and iterate creative ideas is critical to surviving and thriving through the current decade of both disruption and transformation – which more of us are viewing as a series of relentless, continuous, and exponential changes, requiring unlearning and radically new learning processes.

In a 2021 Deloitte survey of 2,260 private – and public-sector CXOs in 21 countries, 60% of the respondents said that they believe disruptions like those seen in 2020 will continue. The resulting challenge is underscored by another of the survey’s findings:

Seventy percent of the CXOs do not have complete confidence in their organisation’s ability to pivot and adapt to disruptive events.

This confidence can be developed by re-thinking how we approach and digest failure, to scale and leverage it as a 21st-century superpower.

Developing 21st-century superpowers

Here are the four key superpowers, to be supported by digital technologies:

Nimbleness: The ability to quickly pivot and move. (“We used to do this, and now we do that.”)
Scalability: The ability to rapidly shift capacity and service levels. (“We used to serve x customers; we now serve 100x customers.”)
Stability: The ability to maintain operational excellence under pressure. (“We will persist despite the challenges.”)
Optionality: The ability to acquire new capabilities through external collaboration. (“Our ecosystem of partners allows us to do things we couldn’t do previously do.”)

Rethinking our fears of failure

None of these 21st-century superpowers can be developed without experimentation and collaboration.

Where you are able to self-regulate your fears of making mistakes and failure, by becoming a smart risk-taker who willingly, stretches the envelope and steps outside of your safety and comfort zones.

This helps maximise your potential and ability to learn and develop in the growth zone, where we stop self-sabotaging our chances of adapting and learning, succeeding, and growing in an uncertain and unstable world.

Everyone hates to fail because it’s hard to self-regulate the basic emotions of disappointment, anger and frustration, and deep shame. Resulting from and the distorted thinking patterns that accompany failure, often immobilising you which results in an unwillingness and inability to disrupt yourself and take intelligent actions.

Slow down to rethink, respond, regroup, play and thrive

It all starts with leading, teaching, mentoring, and coaching people to slow down, to learn, and appreciate the value of taking “time-out” for retreat and reflection.

At ImagineNation, in last week’s blog, we described how this involves developing regular reflective practices, where people can pay deep attention, and learn how to master these basic emotions and unresourceful thought patterns. How this allows them to be playful and experimental in developing new mindsets, rethinking habits, and resourceful emotional states, which are foundational for developing 21st-century superpowers.

Failure can become valued as a process and resource for effecting significant human-centric change, deepening learning, and improving your future fitness.

Consequences of avoiding failure

According to the same article in Psychology today – “shame is a psychologically toxic emotion because instead of feeling bad about our actions (guilt) or our efforts (regret) shame makes us feel who we are”.

By getting to the core of your egos, your identities, your self-esteem, and your feelings of emotional well-being and resourceful thinking habits.

Because everyone hates to fail, we all unconsciously seek ways of mitigating the implications of a potential failure – “for example, by buying unnecessary new clothes for a job interview instead of reading up on the company – which allows us to use the excuse, “I just didn’t have time to fully prepare.”

Benefits of embracing failure

Rather than succumbing to the notion that everyone hates to fail, it is much more useful to develop healthier ways of embracing and flowing with it which might:

Motivate you to reflect deeply to consider and deliberate as to what might be the most intelligent and brave actions to take under the range of circumstances you find yourself in.
Inspire you to risk-taking those intelligent actions through developing sound risk anticipation, management, and mitigation strategies that help boost your confidence.
Commit to doing just a bit more, in inventive ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives as well to your customer’s experience of your product or service.
Encourage you to access your multiple and collective intelligence, be more courageous, compassionate, and creative in co-sensing, co-discovering, co-designing, and co-creating innovative solutions to complex problems.
Enable you to learn from others, and harness people’s collective intelligence to adapt and grow, through teaming, in ways that serve the common good.

Tips for rethinking and self-regulating fears of failure

A few tips to support you to rethink, respond, regroup and thrive that we will explore more deeply, through real-life stories and examples, in our next two ImagineNation™ blog posts (November and December):

Be willing to redefine and reframe failure as what it means in your unique context, review past failures and see if you can find benefits that resulted from them.
Set approach goals and not avoidance goals to view failure as a challenge that can be mastered.
Control the controllable by intentionally managing your mindsets, shifting any negative perspective, and unpacking distortion and generalisations about failures and their negative consequences.
Imagine yourself doing well, achieving your goals by composing and painting a picture or image of a desirable and compelling future success.
Develop healthy self-compassion for when you do mess up, make mistakes and fail, by being kind and understanding, and empathic to your won humanness.
Focus on every experience, no matter what it brings is an opportunity for deep learning and creative and inventive change.

Rather than living in a world where everyone hates to fail, why not adopt the rethink, respond, regroup, thrive pattern, be future-fit and develop your set of 21st-century superpowers in the face of the acute disruption of COVID-19?

Where it is expected that the business environment, over the next three to five years, will be the most exciting and innovative period that many of us may learn from and experience in our lifetimes?

Want to know why you might have a fear of failure?

Participate in our online research study “Ten Signs you may have a fear of failure” which we adapted from the article “10 Signs That You Might Have Fear of Failure… and 2 ways to overcome it and succeed” by Guy Winch Ph.D. in Psychology Today. Click here to access the survey.

We will happily share the results and findings with you if you leave your name and email address on the form provided. By sharing these details, you will also qualify for a complimentary 30 minute one on one online innovation coaching session, with one of our global professionally certified coaches to help you overcome your own anxieties and fears about failure and develop your 21st-century superpowers.

Join our next free “Making Innovation a Habit” masterclass to re-engage 2022!

Our 90-minute masterclass and creative conversation will help you develop your post-Covid-19 re-engagement strategy. It’s on Thursday, 10th February at 6.30 pm Sydney and Melbourne, 8.30 pm Auckland, 3.30 pm Singapore, 11.30 am Abu Dhabi and 8.30 am Berlin. Find out more.

Image credit: Unsplash

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You Must Play and Experiment to Create and Innovate

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You Must Play and Experiment to Create and Innovate

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Growing up in the fashion industry, in 1980’s Paris, I forged an exciting global career and experienced, first hand, a diverse range of the most amazingly innovative fashion presentations ever. It was the dawn of an explosive era where fashion really mattered and wonderful events became really fantastic happenings featuring a lot of playful and experimental theatrical performances and fabulous guest stars on the catwalk. “From Claude Montana to Thierry Mugler, from Giorgio Armani to Franco Moschino, from Jean Charles de Castelbajac to Christian Lacroix, there were many designers who shaped the aesthetics of the era with their creations and shows” – whose creativity, still impact us across the arts and other key industries today.

Being playful and experimental

Reinforcing that in the arts and other industries, and in our professional and personal lives, newness, creativity, and innovation only happen through people being willing to be both playful and experimental.

This is useful to know, especially with the range of constraints and restrictions occurring globally as a result of fierce governmental reactive response to managing the Covid-19 pandemic. Coupling these with the challenges and limitations of a remote and hybrid workplace, are combining to cause many of us to achingly long for more freedom, fun, play, and adventure. Yet, many of us, are feeling bound to our laptops, TV’s and kitchens, and are locked within the boundaries of our homes and local neighbourhoods.

It is possible to shift the range of negative feelings that lockdowns produce by exploring possibilities and opportunities for expanding our knowledge and learning, by knowing how to be more playful and experimental, and especially by taking up a set of regular reflective practices.

A unique moment in time

Using this unique moment in time to take up a set of reflective practices to ignite our creative juices and expand our appetite and capacity for creativity.

At the same time, use this moment to explore opportunities to learn and expand our knowledge, because, knowledge plays an important role in the productivity and prosperity of economies, organisations, and individuals and the post-Covid-19 world is going to need a lot of new knowledge in the coming decade of both disruption and transformation.

Expanding our knowledge

Most of us are aware that, our desire to create, and actually be playful and experiential usually involves learning from some kind of direct experience. Like painting, where our hands are likely to get dirty, where we may produce a number of poor efforts (which we often hide) before we eventually create one, we can accept and live with.

Learning from a direct experience is more effective if coupled with reflection – that is, the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.

Where research reveals that the effect of reflection on learning is mediated by a greater perceived ability to achieve a goal in that it improves your confidence, self-belief, and conviction that you can achieve it.

Learning from reflecting on experience

Making the learning experience a playful and experimental one allows us to have fun, in ways that engage our multiple intelligences – our cognitive brains, and heart and gut brains in ways that create meta-shifts that challenge our mental maps.

This also helps us develop our learning agility – “learning what to do when you don’t know what to do” especially important in a world of constant and disruptive change.

Which will especially be a very vital and critical skill set to cultivate in the post-Covid-19 world, where there is no playbook, or reliable template for long-term planning the results we might want, in a disruptive and uncertain future.

Starting with elastic thinking

It starts with developing our elastic thinking skills, where according to Leonard Mlodinow – it is now prime time for people to harness the power of “elastic thinking” to navigate an unstable world and underpins our ability to adapt and be creative.

And involves “developing the capacity to let go of comfortable ideas and become accustomed to ambiguity and contradiction; the capability to rise above conventional mindsets and to reframe the questions we ask; the ability to abandon our ingrained assumptions and open ourselves to new paradigms; the propensity to rely on imagination as much as on logic and to generate and integrate a wide variety of ideas; and the willingness to experiment and be tolerant of failure.”

At ImagineNation™ we developed a four-step cognitive process to help people stretch their mental maps, feelings, thinking, behaviours, and actions, enabling them to be playful and experimental by focussing on these key elements that enable reflective practice:

Discovering
Sensemaking
Internalising
Applying

Exploring the role of failing fast

Getting to the creative and innovative outcomes, when playing and experimenting with thinking or acting differently, usually involves some kind of failure, where we fail flat on our faces!

Yet when being brave playful and courageous, and experimenting, you have to be willing to make mistakes and fail. The key is to try out things, and experiment, like children, do, and not worry about what others think and say about you, when you make a mistake or fail.

At the same time, adopting a reflective practice supports our willingness to let go and come from a beginners mind, to unlearn what may have worked previously, whilst being vulnerable and open-hearted, minded and willed to deeply reflect on what happened and what knowledge you may gain and what you might learn from it.

Continuously learning from reflective practice

This means that “work must become more learningful” where an organisations’ or teams’ collective aspiration is set free and people have permission, safety, and trust to be playful and experimental.

To “learn by doing and reflecting” through being:

Encouraged to continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire,
Re-educated to elasticize their thinking and develop new mental maps and where expansive patterns of feeling and thinking are nurtured,
Committed to continuously learning how to learn together, at a speed faster than the competition.

Resulting in the intelligence of the organisation or team exceeding the intelligence of individuals in the team and in the organisation, and by harnessing the collective’s capacity to create, invent and innovate through enacting a set of habitual reflective practices.

CCS Cards for play and critical reflection:

As a side note, it’s worth mentioning a tool we like to use that can provide both a sense of play and an opportunity for critical reflection. As many of you may know, CCS Cards are image cards containing a special set of photos, illustrations, and words. Just holding them, sorting them, and talking about what particular cards might mean for you, is an enjoyable, playful activity that often leads to fresh, creative responses.

Furthermore, as a tool for reflective practice, CCS Cards give people a powerful way to recall and recreate their lived experiences by incorporating their feelings and emotions. The cards provide participants with self-selected representations that they can link to all the associated concepts, feelings, words, and actions that were part of the lived experience. Armed with this clearer picture, they are better able to reflect upon and learn from their experience. The cards also provide an easy way to share and compare their reflections with others, which is vital for effective collaboration.

Bringing together theory and practice

Enacting a set of reflective practices helps us effectively bring together and integrate theory and practice, where through reflection, people are able to:

Discover new mental maps, feelings, thoughts, and ideas,
Make sense of these in their own context or situation,
Internalize and assimilate the impact of these mental maps, thoughts, feelings, and actions by introducing options and choices for being, thinking, and acting differently,
Apply that information to add to their existing knowledge base and reach a higher level of understanding,
Adapt how they feel, think and act as resources in new, unknown, unexpected, and disruptive situations, as well as in how they plan, implement, and review their actions.

Surely, these might comprise a helpful set of strategies to embrace to help you thrive in these challenging times?

Isn’t there an inherent opportunity for all of us to discover and explore new ways of having more fun, by being playful and experimental?

Perhaps we might discover new ways of adapting and thriving individually and collectively co-create more individual freedom, wonderful fun, and exciting adventures that we are all craving, and become future-fit, in our constantly changing, uncertain, and unstable world.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators Certified Program, a collaborative, intimate, and deep personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, starting Tuesday, February 1, 2022. It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, to upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique context.

Join our next free “Making Innovation a Habit” masterclass to re-engage 2022!

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How to Foster an Innovation Mindset Within Your Team

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How to Foster an Innovation Mindset Within Your Team

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In today’s rapidly evolving world, businesses thrive when they foster a culture of innovation. Without an innovation mindset within your team, it becomes challenging to adapt to market changes, efficiently solve complex problems, and stay ahead of the competition. This article explores strategies for nurturing a mindset that embraces innovation. By encouraging curiosity, embracing failure as a learning opportunity, and fostering a sense of ownership, leaders can unlock their team’s full creative potential.

1. Encouraging Curiosity:

One essential element in fostering an innovation mindset is to encourage curiosity among team members. By nurturing a natural and inquisitive mindset, individuals become more open to exploring new ideas and challenging the status quo. Google, an industry leader renowned for its innovative culture, dedicates approximately 20% of employees’ time towards pursuing their own passion projects. This approach not only empowers individuals but also allows them to uncover breakthrough solutions that benefit the company as a whole.

2. Embracing Failure as a Learning Opportunity:

Innovation requires taking risks, which inevitably leads to failures along the way. However, instead of viewing failures negatively, teams must embrace them as valuable learning opportunities. Chobani, the popular yogurt brand, had their innovation team launch a new product that failed to perform optimally. Rather than abandoning the concept, Chobani saw it as a stepping stone to success. By analyzing the failures and making necessary adjustments, they refined their product, resulting in a game-changing success. Encouraging a culture that celebrates learning from mistakes is crucial in shaping an innovation-driven mindset.

3. Fostering a Sense of Ownership:

To foster an innovation mindset, team members must feel a sense of ownership over their work. This ownership allows individuals to fully invest their creativity and passion into their projects, driving them to go above and beyond. At 3M, employees are encouraged to spend 15% of their work time on projects of their own choice. This approach not only gives employees autonomy but also empowers them to take responsibility for the outcomes. By fostering a sense of ownership, leaders create an environment where employees are motivated to think outside the box, leading to breakthrough innovations.

Innovation Beyond Boundaries: Expanding Your Mindset

To learn more about expanding your innovation mindset beyond your team, check out this insightful article by Dennis Stauffer: Mastering Your Innovation Mindset. In his piece, Stauffer delves into strategies for driving innovation at the organizational level, providing useful insights into leveraging diverse perspectives, cross-functional collaboration, and disruptive thinking.

Conclusion

Creating an innovation mindset within your team is vital for driving continuous growth and staying competitive in today’s dynamic business landscape. By encouraging curiosity, embracing failures as learning opportunities, and fostering a sense of ownership, leaders can unlock their team’s full creative potential. These strategies, backed up by real-life case studies from industry leaders, demonstrate how nurturing an innovation mindset leads to transformative outcomes. Embrace the power of innovation and unlock your team’s potential today!

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Cultivating a Growth Mindset for Innovation by Embracing Failure

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Cultivating a Growth Mindset for Innovation by Embracing Failure

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Innovation is the lifeblood of progress. Brilliant ideas, groundbreaking inventions, and paradigm-shifting discoveries have the potential to reshape industries and improve lives. However, the path to innovation is rarely smooth or straightforward. It is riddled with setbacks, obstacles, and failures. It is in this realm of failure that a growth mindset becomes crucial for fostering innovation. This article explores the significance of embracing failure and presents two compelling case studies that demonstrate how a growth mindset paves the way to remarkable innovation.

Case Study 1: Thomas Edison and the Persistence of a Growth Mindset

Thomas Edison, the iconic inventor, is widely regarded as one of history’s greatest innovators. However, his path to success was paved with countless failures. When developing the electric light bulb, Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” This quote encapsulates his unwavering commitment to embracing failure as an inherent part of the innovation process.

Edison’s growth mindset allowed him to view each unsuccessful attempt as a valuable learning opportunity. Instead of dwelling on his mistakes, he cultivated a relentless determination to keep trying new ideas and approaches. This mindset ultimately led to his triumph, revolutionizing the world with the invention of a practical and commercially viable electric light bulb. By embracing failure, Edison epitomized the essence of a growth mindset, showcasing its unrivaled potential for driving innovation.

Case Study 2: PayPal and the Agile Approach to Failure

PayPal, the pioneering online payment system, also serves as an illuminating case study in embracing failure and cultivating a growth mindset. In the early days of the company, PayPal’s co-founders, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Elon Musk, encountered several hurdles and near-catastrophic failures. Cyber fraud, operational inefficiencies, and a lack of customer adoption threatened to derail the company.

However, rather than succumbing to defeat, PayPal’s leaders fostered a growth mindset throughout their organization. They implemented an agile approach, emphasizing experimentation, quick iterations, and learning from failures as a core part of their innovation strategy. By constantly iterating and adapting, PayPal turned these failures into fuel for growth, innovating quickly to address challenges head-on. This adaptive mindset propelled PayPal to success, eventually becoming one of the world’s leading online payment platforms.

The Power of a Growth Mindset:

These two case studies highlight the transformative power of embracing failure and cultivating a growth mindset for innovation. Edison’s unwavering persistence and PayPal’s agile approach serve as reminders that failure is not the end but rather a stepping stone towards progress. By acknowledging failure as an opportunity for growth, organizations and individuals can foster innovation, overcome obstacles, and achieve remarkable success.

Promoting a growth mindset empowers individuals and organizations to approach failure with resilience and adaptability. Leaders must encourage an environment where experimentation and calculated risk-taking are valued. This requires acknowledging and celebrating not only successes but also the valuable lessons learned from failed attempts.

Conclusion

Embracing failure is a prerequisite for fostering innovation. Drawing inspiration from the examples of Thomas Edison and PayPal, it becomes evident that cultivating a growth mindset is the key to transforming failures into stepping stones for success. By viewing failures as learning opportunities, persistently iterating, and adapting to challenges, individuals and organizations can unlock their true potential for innovation. Let us embrace failure, for it is through failure that we pave the pathway to a brighter and more innovative future.

Image credit: Misterinnovation.com

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Learning from Failure

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How to Embrace Risk and Succeed in Innovation

Learning from Failure

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Innovation requires individuals and organizations to not only recognize opportunities for development but also the risks involved in potential failure. The key to successful innovation is learning to embrace these risks, as failure often provides invaluable opportunities to grow and improve.

For many people, failure can be seen as a cause of embarrassment, or a sign of shame. However, history shows us that for ambitious and creative problem-solvers, failure often leads to success. Many famous innovations, from penicillin to the light bulb, were the product of multiple failed experiments and experiences. It can be said that successful innovators accept failure as an essential part of the challenge, with each roadblock providing an opportunity to re-evaluate, re-calibrate and eventually succeed.

The following case studies demonstrate how failure can be embraced in order to succeed in innovation.

Case Study 1 – Apple’s First Foray Into Home Computing

In 1979, Apple Computer Inc. released the Apple II, one of the very first consumer-level home computers. Following their success, Apple felt inspired to launch a new product, the Apple III. Unfortunately, due to a flaw in the design, the product was met with customer disappointment, especially compared to their first success. Rather than be disheartened by this failure, the team instead learned from their experience and created the famous Macintosh computer in 1984. Apple had taken the risk to build a new product, and in doing so, learned valuable lessons about hardware and software integration through their mistake, eventually leading to the invention of the Macintosh.

Case Study 2 – Gatorade’s Introduction of Crystal Light

In 1983, Gatorade, a company known for their sporting drinks, decided to create a sweetened drink for non-athletic types. Pitched as an excellent source of vitamins, the Gatorade Crystal Light was designed as a dietary beverage for the active lifestyle. Unfortunately, due to its overly sweet flavor, unfavorable packaging, and ignored target market, the product flopped compared to their existing product. Confronted with this failure, Gatorade instead chose to analyze market research and completely revamp their product. After two years, they re-launched the product with a more natural flavor, sustainably sourced ingredients, and a lighter label. This new version of the product was much more successful and is still available in stores today.

Conclusion

Both of these examples demonstrate that failure is an essential component of innovation, and can be a crucible for improvement. Failure teaches us to recognize which ideas and approaches were successful, and what mistakes to avoid in the future. Furthermore, failure pushes us to remain creative and ambitious, as it continually encourages us to try new things and think differently.

Ultimately, the ability to accept failure and adjust ideas and strategies based on customer feedback is key to successful innovation. As we continue to identify opportunities for increased growth and development, we must approach each hurdle with the understanding that mistakes are necessary, and often lead to learning and improvement. The key is to not be sidelined by failure, but embrace it for all it’s worth.

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Failing Fast Leads to More Failure

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Most Companies Fail at Innovation Because... One scary statistic is that 70% of change initiatives fail. An overwhelming proportion of new product launches fail. Most new businesses fail.

The sad fact is that failure is all around us.

Is this why so many organizations talk about a fear of failure being one of their major innovation stumbling blocks?

And, so what mantra do many innovation and growth gurus expound as a solution?

“We need to fail fast.”

“We need to fail forward.”

“We need to fail smart.”

So, the solution most innovation consultancies put forward to organizations already coping with the wide ranging effects of failure, is to tell their employees that they need to fail more.

Say what?

If you can’t tell already, I really hate the whole fail fast mantra. Can we kill it yet?

You don’t want to fail fast, you want to learn fast.

And so, if you switch to learning fast instead, the efforts of your employees should then become laser focused on identifying what you need to learn with each iteration, or each experiment.

And your focus should also then become all about how well you are instrumenting for the learning you are trying to achieve.

This is more consistent with failing forward, but WE ARE NOT FOCUSED ON FAILURE.

Focusing on failure, leads to failure. Failure becomes the expected outcome.

Instead, we are focused on learning fast, and we can learn equally well from success as we can from failure – if our learning instrumentation is good.

The way that you achieve success in change AND in innovation, is by working hard to move the potential causes of failure farther forward in the innovation or change project lifecycle so that you have an opportunity to either design the flaws or obstacles out, or communicate them out by forcing the tough conversations during your planning process (for change or innovation) — this comes before you even begin executing your plan.

You’ve got to surface the sources of resistance, the faulty assumptions, and the barriers to be overcome — early.

Then we build a plan focused not on quick wins, but on maintaining transparency and momentum throughout the change implementation.

You may have noticed that I use the terms innovation and change almost interchangeably (often in the same sentence). This is because innovation is all about change, and because many of the barriers to change inside organizations are the same barriers that innovators face.

As an answer to these challenges, I created the Change Planning Toolkit™ to help organizations beat the 70% change failure rate by providing a suite of tools that allow change leaders to make a more visual, collaborative approach to change efforts. At the center of the approach sits the Change Planning Canvas™, very visual, very collaborative ala Lean Startup to help you prototype and evolve your change approach before you ever begin. The toolkit comes with a QuickStart Guide and my latest book Charting Change was designed to ground people in the philosophies that will help them succeed with both little C change efforts (projects) and big C change efforts (digital transformations, mergers, acquisitions, INNOVATION, etc.).

So, stop bringing more failure into your organization, and instead bring the tools into your organization that will help you achieve more success!

SPECIAL UPDATE

The Experiment Canvas

To help everyone accelerate their learning and to achieve better success in their human-centered innovation efforts, I will be creating and licensing a Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ to innovation consultants and practitioners around the world. I have been sharing early elements with my clients and I’m proud to be able to give you all a valuable taste of the kinds of tools that will be in this toolkit when it launches later this year by providing advance access to the first free download – The Experiment Canvas™. Designed to be used iteratively, and to quickly capture in a visual, collaborative way (in similar fashion the Change Planning Toolkit™).

Download The Experiment Canvas™ as a 35″x56″ scalable FREE PDF poster download

If you’re not clear on what the Change Planning Toolkit™ can do for you, please join me Thursday, June 8th at 9am PDT on Twitter for an Ask Me Anything (aka #AMA) session on the Change Planning Toolkit™ using the hashtag #cptoolkit and well, ask me anything!

A future #AMA on the Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ is coming soon too!

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