Failure can lead to Success

Most business people are aware that failure can be a useful learning process - allowing those who are part of the failure to learn lessons about what went wrong and/or where they could have improved their performance … and especially where they lack specific skills  and experience.

Now this ‘principle’ is being taken further by setting up ‘productive failure’ - giving individuals or groups tasks which include s strong chance of complete or partial failure.

One way of doing this is to give the individual or group a task which requires skills or experience they don’t have - for example by asking a group to design a new AI-related service when their normal field of experience is, say, hardware engineering or accountancy.

The team should not know the nature of the ‘experiment’ - they should feel the exercise is a positive one - for them and for the company.  Thus, it must relate to the company’s portfolio of products or services - and the current company content.

Of course the team must be given the chance to debrief their experience and identify where their skills/experience were lacking or how they could havre tackled the task differently.  

It may be that the group includes highly creative people who come up with genuinely useful ideas.   So much the better, of course,  Whether the group comes up with useful ideas, or is unable to so so, the company wins.