Business growth: Intelligent failure
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About thirty years ago, Eli Lilly and Co., the Indiana-based pharmaceutical company, was conducting clinical trials for a potential blockbuster drug called Alimta for treating lung cancer. The upside was one of huge potential for Lilly. The downside was one of losing millions in research dollars if the development of the drug was unsuccessful. Long story short, the drug failed at first, but Lilly scientists and management, true to their Indiana heritage, failed forward in a way which resulted in yet another blockbuster success for the company.
In her recently released book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, goes on to cite the story of Alimta and the journey taken by scientists at Lilly.
Because of the tenacity and persistence of the Alimta development team, they kept examining and reviewing the data from the clinical trials. To their credit, they did not just give up and consider the drug a complete failure. They discovered Alimta did work on some patients, but not all of them. They determined the new drug was not as effective if the patient happened to have a lower level of folic acid in their body. When the researchers added the ingredient to Alimta, it passed the necessary clinical trials and went on to become another successful lung cancer treatment for the drugmaker and its patients.
In her book, Professor Edmondson goes on to tell the story of when she was preparing for her doctoral dissertation in 1993 by conducting an experiment in two hospitals. She thought hospital teams who worked together would make fewer medical errors. Upon completing her study, the results reflected the opposite; teams who worked better together made more errors, than those teams who did not work well together.
Edmondson encourages people to face failure in order to learn from it. In her study, she asked people if they agreed with the following statement; “If you make a mistake in this unit, it won’t be held against you.” As Edmondson dug deeper into her analysis, she determined teams that worked together well did NOT necessarily make more mistakes, they just felt more comfortable in admitting it if they did make a mistake. Thus, she was able to develop the term of what has been called ‘psychological safety’, which basically means, people should feel safe to fail.
Human nature dictates that people consider any form of failure as abject failure, but Edmondson considers, suggests, and proposes from her research there are different levels of failure, many of which result in a path to success.
She suggests using a four-step approach to feeling safe about failure:
Persistence: “Accepting fallibility is not about letting you off the hook, it’s about putting you on the hook to do the very best you can. If you are going to do anything hard or new, you are not necessarily going to get it right the first time,” she says.
Reflection: Develop and maintain some means of keeping information (or data, in the case of Eli Lilly scientists) that will allow you to look back and help you determine what went right and what went wrong. This simple approach can help you refine how you can go about making your next move.
Accountability: Edmondson suggests “Ask, ‘What did I do or not do that could have made a difference in preventing the undesired outcome?’ It is hard to do, but it’s also empowering because it gives you agency that you can then redeploy going forward.”
Apologizing: It is important to apologize if your failure resulted in some form of harm. Her main point for apologizing is to give you the clarity of focus on what it was that contributed or led to the failure, as opposed to just looking at the exercise itself as a failure.
Her work is a perfect example of the cliché about ‘making lemonade when you are handed lemons.’ It takes a special person to turn negatives into positives or failures into successes. While her work from several decades ago provided the platform for a new way of dealing with failure, it has helped shape and mold how we look at and address failure in an entirely different way today.
The effort put forward by Lilly is a perfect example of intelligent failure, according to Edmondson. As Sir Winston Churchill once said, “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”