Are You Learning From Failure To Get Better At Innovation?

By Rob Wright, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader
Follow Me On Twitter @RfwrightLSL

Read the full interview with Kemal Malik: Guiding Bayer's Global Innovation Engines To New Heights

Kemal Malik is the Bayer board of management member who heads up his company’s global innovation engine. According to Malik, innovation and failure are “strange bedfellows.” “If someone comes to me and says, ‘I've never failed or made a mistake,’ I'd get very worried about them, because they are basically saying they've never tried anything,” he states. According to Malik, admitting failure can be incredibly hard, because no one rejoices in saying, “I failed yesterday. Isn't that fantastic?” While he says you are probably not going to get to that level of transparency, you should still strive to create a culture that removes the “ridiculous” fear of failure. To do so, consider how you conduct a lessons-learned exercise with failed projects.  

Do’s And Don’ts Of Conducting A Lessons-Learned Exercise

A common business practice after completion of a project, whether considered a success or failure, is to determine what if anything could have been done differently. The process of evaluating the implementation and execution of a project involves conducting a lessons-learned exercise. Ideally, discussion and documentation of these lessons learned should occur throughout the life of a project. What better way to define and capture a good work practice or innovative approach than to do so at the end of each project phase while the facts are still fresh in your mind. This exercise also allows you to share the lessons learned more quickly with people executing similar projects. Unfortunately, we often get so focused on developing and executing the project itself that we fail to build in a lessons-learned discussion. Additionally, when we do add the lessons-learned step, we often tend to focus on only the negative. In fact, referring to this process as “conducting a post-mortem” does not create the right mindset for capturing the good along with the bad. There is a lot to be gained from understanding why certain things went well even if the whole project was considered a failure. Finally, if you turn this process into a “witch-hunt” you will inevitably find witches. The best way to prevent this from happening is to make conducting lessons-learned exercises a consistent part of your organization’s process.

How To Conduct A Lessons-Learned Exercise

Conducting a basic lessons-learned exercise has five steps: (1) define the project; (2) collect information; (3) verify and synthesize information; (4) store the information for future reference; and (5) disseminate the information.

Good questions to get you started are:

1. What went well? Why? What was the impact? How can we replicate this?

2. What did not go well? Why? What was the impact? What can be done to avoid these problems in future?

You also may want to create a category for collecting other things of note, such as unintended outcomes that happened during or because of the project which may be neither positive nor negative. Here are six best practices you may want to consider incorporating as you embark on your next lessons-learned exercise:

1. Do it soon after the event so you don’t lose momentum.

2. Limit the issues to five or 10. Identifying 497 areas of improvement is demotivating and pointless.

3. Get executive sponsorship, and make sure this person supports the project so it isn’t moved to the back burner.

4. When possible, get an outsider to help. Someone without a vested interest and emotional baggage can usually think without bias.

5. Publish the results, at least internally. By making the process and results visible, people are kept informed and will buy-in to recommendations.

6. Be sure to quickly plan to implement recommendations.

Finally, don’t overlook the importance of learning how to go about facilitating an effective lessons-learned discussion. There are number of free resources available online to help get you started. Should you require a more detailed lessons-learned exercise, here is a comprehensive guide to capturing lessons learned developed by The Nature Conservancy. You may also find this resource on how to conduct an after-action review (AAR) to be very insightful. By incorporating a better approach to learning from success as well as failure, you will not only increase the likelihood of receiving more innovative ideas, but create a culture where it is much more enjoyable to do so.