The Leadership Mindset Shift That Turns Failure Into Innovation

Over the past several weeks, I’ve given keynotes that covered a wide range of topics – from how leaders can help their team overcome performance barriers, to what leaders should do to promote a continuous learning culture.

Despite the varied nature of these keynotes, there was one message I wanted to share with the leaders in attendance because it represents a fundamental truth of what it takes to lead in these uncertain times:

To unleash innovation, we shouldn’t aim to “fail fast”. Rather, we need to create conditions where failure is treated as a stepping stone towards collective learning that will drive innovation and growth. 

What a $100M Detergent Failure Taught P&G About Listening to Customers

To help illustrate what I mean, consider this story of when P&G tried to market a new detergent in Mexico. Given its low-income population and limited access to fresh water, they designed a detergent where you used less than the competing brand and it wouldn’t create a lot of suds to save on water.

On paper, this sounded like a winning product to break into this new market. And yet, the product turned out to be a complete failure. So what went wrong?

Well for starters, Mexican consumers didn’t believe you could use less detergent and get your clothes clean. But more importantly, as the product didn’t make a lot of suds, people thought it wasn’t working and so they used even more detergent than their previous brand to make sure it cleaned their clothes.

Thanks to this very public failure, the leaders at P&G realized they had to change their process of developing new products. And the new approach they learned from this failure reflects a strategy creativity expert Matthew E May shared with me on my “Leadership Biz Cafe” podcast.

The Toyota Principle That Reframes How Leaders Respond to Failure

During his time working with Toyota, Matthew learned about an approach executives used called “Genchi Genbutsu“, which in Japanese means “go look, go see.”

In the context of treating failure as a stepping stone to true innovation, this means shifting our mindset from asking “who’s responsible?” to asking “what can we learn?”

That we make ourselves open to learning how we can do better going forward by embracing the hard-earned insights revealed through our mistakes.

From “Who’s Responsible?” to “What Can We Learn?” — The Mindset Shift Leaders Need

The truth is to do anything worthwhile means we must be ready to embrace failure in all its messy forms. It’s the only way that will help you build develop the leadership skills you’ll need to help your organization to succeed and grow in this uncertain, rapidly evolving world.