Don't Sweep Failure Under The Rug: It May Be Keeping You From Success
Lego Secrets to Success
Working this week with one of the great tech companies, we reviewed a pivotal approach to addressing failure. As we explored how to build and sustain an innovative culture, we kept talking about the dangers of sweeping failures under the rug. Most companies do it, and as a result, most companies fail to learn the truly valuable lessons that could accelerate their success.
Consider the contrast trajectories of Playmobile and Lego. During the 1970s and 1980s Lego and Playmobile were of roughly comparable size. Although Lego was always slightly larger, today Lego dwarfs the size and popularity of Playmobile. One reason is Lego's attitude towards failure.
In conversation with Lego's CEO, we discussed an early failure that accelerated their trajectory to the incredible Lego success of today. Lego had launched a product with a digital add-on, one of their first forays into the digital world. The product crashed and burned. Rather than blame the team who launched it or whisper in the hallway about the disaster, they sat down and did a careful, open, and positive post-mortem of what they learned from the experience.
What rose to the surface proved truly transformative for Lego. The team realized that they lived in a product-based world where, if everyone does their job well, they make and ship products once. After it leaves the warehouse, they never see it or hear about it again.
By contrast, in a digital world cycles are continuous. If you ship a digital product, it needs to be updated, improved, and evolved. Although this may seem obvious to digital native companies it proved vital to Lego's future success as they move into a digital future.
More importantly, the process itself of purposefully trying to learn as much as possible at every juncture is the real secret to their success and the reason why today Lego is such breakout story. Although we are inclined to sweep a failure under the rug, redeeming the failure by focusing on what we learn could not only improve our current effort, but may provide the clue to breakout success we have been missing!
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