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Should Failure Be Rewarded To Spur Innovation?
Lucas123 writes "Paper products maker Kimberly-Clark drove the morale of its IT infrastructure group into the ground after massive firings and outsourcing. When they hired a new VP of Infrastructure four years later to turn things around, he implemented a program to spur innovation. The VP took a venture capitalist approach where any employee could submit an idea and if accepted, make a pitch in 30 minutes or less. If the idea had merit, it received first, then second rounds of funding. If not, the employee's idea still got lauded on the company's internal Sharepoint site. As he puts it, 'Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. It's about what we learn from the failure. Not the failure itself. We celebrate that learning.'"
Until Morale Improves.
If not, the employee's idea still got lauded on the company's internal Sharepoint site. As he puts it, 'Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. It's about what we learn from the failure. Not the failure itself. We celebrate that learning.
Really? Seriously?
I'm supposed to be motivated by a mention on a sharepoint site?
What they don't do is "rewarding failure". They hand out incentives for trying. Subtle differences between those two....
If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems
I think I'd find failing 90% of the time completely demoralising, but it's certainly true that if you never fail then you're probably not exploring really interesting possibilities.
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I wonder if the employee which proposed the idea is appointed to implement it or if s/he gets a share of the money the company makes or saves.
Failure is its own reward IF YOU LEARN SOMETHING
If you don't, YOU DON'T DESERVE A REWARD
Sorry for massive caps, but I didn't feel bold or em are emphatic enough.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I teach a robotics class for 9th-12th graders using NXT Mindstorm. I have a number of challenges which are difficult to finish by design. When I grade, I tell them they are supposed to fail, and the grade is not for failing to achieve the task, but how they overcome that failure, and (as important) how they formulated a new solution as a team. I look for progress in working towards a goal. Since we have a time constraint on each challenge, often half the teams will not reach the goal.
But along the way, I see some very interesting solutions and innovative ideas. Once I take away the risk of failing for not achieving goal "A", the students become much more daring (or as daring as you can be with Mindstorm robots) in trying out new ideas to the problem. This is my second year doing this class, and I have two teams going to the state robotics competition.
Share the "failure". Let others take a look at it. Let someone else take a stab at it.
The "Reward" in this case sounds like they're recognizing employees who are making an effort to change things. They are providing information about the project attempt and letting others know what's going on instead of sweeping it under the rug and ignoring that it ever happened.
Done PROPERLY I can see this being a major positive, especially for morale. "Hey, Bob went to pitch his idea today, but it didn't pan out. I think I see what killed it and I might have a solution for that..." Granted I also expect massive backstabbing if this is implemented wrong. Instead of collaboration it can very quickly devolve into theft and sabotage.
Or am I misinterpreting the story?
This guy's way of encouraging new ideas from the employees is a good one. But publishing the failures on a website runs the risk of the website becoming a 'wall of shame' instead of being seen as a reward for having presented the idea in the first place. It also runs the risk of having people submit ideas they know are ridiculous just so they can be given whatever reward comes for presenting an idea at all.
But otherwise his head is screwed on straight as far as I can tell. He's right, it's very difficult to create an organization that rewards new ideas. Almost everything in business is set against this. It's why so many big companies 'innovate' by acquisition. And punishing failure makes the problem worse.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Get a government bailout, and start issuing bonuses with the money.
The title of the slashdot posting missed the point entirely. The point is not to reward failure, but instead to accept it. Failure is an inherent part of moving forward, especially when it comes to innovation. You can't honestly expect every attempt to have a 100% success rate, and if you restrict all new efforts to those which you believe have almost no chance of failing...well, you won't be making many efforts at all. Does anyone remember how many people were skeptical about the first iPad, groaning about the price, about how it wasn't enough to be a computer (which you could also buy at the same cost) but wasn't able to serve as a phone? A failure-intolerant environment would have listened to those concerns, and the iPad never would have launched. And what a mistake THAT would have been..
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The problem with the approach of that VP is that it is NOT HIS MONEY he is playing with.
Certainly almost anybody can come up with dozens of ideas for a 'business', ideas, as they say, are dime a dozen. What makes an idea work is implementation, a lot of sweat, a lot of resources dumped into it, some luck (hopefully you have at least a little bit of that, otherwise sucks to be you).
But the problem with the approach of that VP is that he is not the one taking the risk, he is placing the risk upon the company, is it done with the approval of the investors, shareholders, owners?
Certainly some money can be allocated by any company of a sufficient enough size to try out new ideas (if they make at least some sense from POV of that business), but again, if the failure rate is too high for those ideas, then it really becomes questionable whether the company should be doing it, unless it is the primary business of the company - like a venture capital firm.
I would say that a company should promote innovation, but it should not sign blank cheques to anybody just because they have an idea, that's a recipe for a bankruptcy.
You can't handle the truth.
It sounds too much like something Dunder Mifflin would do.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
A salesman once screwed up and lost a contract early in Microsoft's history, then appeared before Bill Gates expecting to be fired for his mistake. Instead Bill told him that his job was secure, because (I'm paraphrasing like mad here) he'd learned a valuable lesson and knew an approach that would not work next time, so it was better for the company to keep him rather than hire someone else without this experience.
Not a new idea among clueful bosses, in other words.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
(I'm still pissed about that one even after 10 years but at least it taught me to avoid working weekends since your boss won't really appreciate it anyway.)
Since THAT boss won't appreciate it... Some do. Some do a lot. They usually also have very good teams.
Just my €0.02.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
In hockey, the most prolific scorers attempt a *lot* of shots. Many are blocked, many miss, many are saved by the goalie. But a few are goals. Gretzky said it best: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
While it's a cute idea, they're still trapped in a binary, aristotelian model of the world that isn't adequate at all.
Very few things in the real world really are clearly distinguishable as "success" or "failure". So we introduce arbitrary criteria, but these fail us as often as they are useful. A lot of innovations came out of "failures".
The solution isn't to reward failure - it is to do away with the concept. So I failed that arbitrary milestone or project goal. Unless the project was a customer request, the real question should be what was actually accomplished.
Because it cuts the other way around, too. One of the unsolved issues of capitalism is the focus on short-term goals and "success" measured in quarterly numbers. It is a massive incentive for deciders to take large, but hidden, risks. Quite a few companies have gone broke only months after paying their executives huge bonuses for their "success".
Because too few people ask the question what it really means for the company to have raised its market share to arbitrary value X and reduced its personal cost to arbitrary value Y while maintaining some arbitrary ratio or key figure at arbitrary value Z.
Because a proper look at failure also requires a proper perspective on success, I doubt we will see it happen, because too much money is in the illusion of "success".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Not that there's anything wrong with that. But how much innovation do they expect, and how high do we expect employee morale to climb? Comparisons to Microsoft and Google elude me.
Gently reply
In my time hanging out in Hans Moravec's mobile robotics lab at CMU in the mid 1980s, Hans said much the same thing. He suggested that good research had to involve a lot of failures, and that is why so many of the straight A students you might think would be best at it are actually temperamentally unsuited for a career in research. He suggested people who have some experience dealing with many early failures early in life were more likely to have the persistence needed for a career in research.
Of course, research these days is so problematical for other reasons too, sadly, so many people won;t even get a chance to step up to the plate in an academic sense:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
So I guess they need to persist in other ways.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Upper management tends to consider itself enlightened, whereas tech are just low-level functionaries who could not possibly grasp the basics of budgeting and return on investment. They never trust, even their most senior and proven people, to come up with ideas which would benefit the company in the long run. If management can't see the benefit themselves, then there is no benefit and money should not be spent.
However, technicians have an important perspective on the company's needs which can only come from having your head down in the trenches. They see opportunities for gain that upper management cannot see, and will never see, despite their importance and reality. Furthermore, some of their technical agendas can't directly translate to numbers despite their real value.
Therefore, truly enlightened upper management will accept a measure of risk, devoting some development bandwidth to the ideas being put forth by their technicians, even though management doesn't quite understand the value. Its true that some of that money might get wasted, but the gains will more than offset the costs.
Unfortunately, such an attitude requires a level of respect and humility not generally found in corporate executives.
see http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
You're "pitching" your idea to the VP of IT. Isn't the VP supposed to be somewhat intelligent on IT subjects?
If someone else can take your idea and successfully "pitch" it with some changes then isn't the VP "playing favourites"?
Otherwise, wouldn't the VP have been able to help you with the problems and get your idea implemented the first time around?
I think it is even worse than that.
"Failure" here is defined as "the VP did not sign off on your idea".
So the only thing being "learned" from this "failure" is how to pitch your idea to that VP (or who gets the most sign-offs vs who gets the least). That's politics. And politics is all about backstabbing and back-room-deals.
You should not be "failing" if you're doing something that 80%+ of the companies have to deal with.
While it is encouraging to see innovation as a management focus, the more interesting story is glossed over.
How is Kimberly keeping the lights on with a crushed IT department?
It seems the basics must be running pretty well if a new IT guy can come in and focus on innovation opportunities. It would help to know if the goal is cost reduction or service enhancement.
I'm supposed to be motivated by a mention on a sharepoint site?
No, you are supposed to be motivated to make sure that your project gets funding instead of being just stuck on a sharepoint site. This is actually a very smart thing to do - it gives credit to the submitter for at least trying and puts the idea out there to see if others can improve on it. At the same time the "reward" (such as it is) is far less than a successful idea so it does not eliminate the motivation for success. Seems like a very clever system...I'm sure whoever came up with the idea for it got more than a mention on a sharepoint site!
I had a boss that gave us double comp time for working weekends when requested to. And brought in a masseuse. No decent bonuses, but extra time off is nice.
im supposed to give them more money to try again? what kind of bullshit is this?
im not against innovation, but im against blatantly unfair corporate practices, where you have one class of people who fuck up their way to the top, while masses of people get fired if they show up a minute late or lose 25 cents of material on a production line.
They weren't innovating anything - they just had to run a secure network (something that's established and has been done).
This is about coming up with new ideas, but giving people credit for the new idea even if it doesn't work out.
"Paper products maker Kimberly-Clark drove the morale of its IT infrastructure group into the ground after massive firings and outsourcing."
They rewarded failure by doing this in the first place.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GND10sWq0n0
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
During his formative years, I told my son, "An idiot keeps making the same mistakes. A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from others' mistakes and avoids them." That didn't stop him from making mistakes, but he never made the same mistake twice, nor made obviously avoidable mistakes.
Sometimes you try and you fail. Learn from it and move on.
Right. Because a idea isn't a failure even if the implementation is. I've had great ideas that when implemented badly turned out very bad. However after retuning the implementation a couple iterations ended up being grand successes. The hard part in some of these things is knowing when an idea is bad, and when the implementation is.
FYI, ideas are bad if the assumptions for the idea are wrong. If the assumptions are correct, then it is the implementation that is bad.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It makes you wonder how long Edison would have lasted in an environment where failure is severely punished. However, throughout the history of technological advancement, failures are often taken up by others who introduce new elements to the solutions and make a success out of the original idea. Apple it a prominent example. Xerox PARCs approach was interesting but as Jobs put it "They did a bunch of things wrong."
That being said, today's American culture of giving out awards for participation is total bullsh*t. It instill a false sense of self-importance resulting in too many people thinking they are entitled to stuff they haven't earned. I was talking to a colleague about his advisory role in a FIRST robotics competition and I said that what America needs is an American Idol level of reward for science, technology, and innovation with all the same fame and popularity. His response was yes, but he's witnessed the team distilling out to one or two kids doing all the work and the rest riding their coattails.
I fail to see where they reward failure. Even if idea is not excepted, that just means it more work to make it a good idea. Put it into the ideapool for the company, and maybe someone will come up with something different that will work. Your not rewarded for failure, your rewarded for trying. Its not the government, where your rewarded for not doing anything.