To innovate you can’t be scared of failure
Failure is a necessary step on the way towards success, and being afraid to fail is one of the most often cited reasons that corporate culture itself fails to produce breakthrough innovation. If you encourage people to be bold, but don’t provide a safe to fail environment, you’re simply creating fear. In reality most people fear failure and worse, their organisations punish it. So what happens, instead of embracing and learning from failure, many business folks make decisions to take short-cuts that avoid failure and at the same time side-step innovative growth that takes the organisation to the next level of success.
Change how to think of failure by thinking of it as required learning. Failure is not new, it has been around forever. Thomas Edison, by example, “failed” over 10,000 times before he was successful with his light bulb invention. His quote is interesting, he said, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. The aim here is not to fail but to be iterative, to succeed we must allow failure on the way, learn as we, tweak, modify, and redo to get where you need to be!
An organization’s ability to learn, and translate insights into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage. Steve Jobs once said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do”.
Abel Smit
Sales Director
Data Solutions & IoT | Europe