The Hard Work of Failure Analysis
HBS Working Knowledge: Organizations: The Hard Work of Failure Analysis: "We all should learn from failure but it's difficult to do so objectively. In this excerpt from 'Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail (Intelligently)' in Long Range Planning Journal, HBS professor Amy Edmondson and coauthor Mark Cannon offer a process for analyzing what went wrong...Lastly, the value of the learning that might result from analyzing and discussing simple mistakes is often overlooked. Many scientific discoveries have resulted from those who were attentive to simple mistakes in the lab. For example, researchers in one of the early German polymer labs occasionally made the mistake of leaving a Bunsen burner lit over the weekend. Upon discovering this mistake on Monday mornings, the chemists simply discarded the overcooked results and went on with their day. Ten years later, a chemist in a polymer lab at DuPont made the same mistake. However, rather than simply discarding the mistake, the Dupont chemist gave the result some analysis and discovered that the fibers had congealed. This discovery was the first step toward the invention of nylon. With similar attention to the minor failure in the German lab, they might have had a decade head start in nylon, potentially dominating the market for year.8
These first two sections have dealt with inadvertent failures. If a firm can identify and analyze such failures, and then learn from them, it may be able to retrieve some value from what has otherwise been a negative "result." But failure need not always be considered from a "defensive" viewpoint. Our third section describes an "offensive" approach to learning from failure—deliberate experimentation. The three activities presented in this article—identifying failure, analyzing failure, and deliberate experimentation—are not intended to be viewed as a sequential three-step process, but rather as (reasonably) independent competencies for learning from failure. They can be sensibly examined alongside each other, since each is easily inhibited by social and technical factors."
posted by Jen @ 11:26 am
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