Strategies for Learning from Failure

Amy C. Edmondson

Article | Harvard Business Review | April 2011

Strategies for Learning from Failure

Abstract

Many executives believe that all failure is bad (although it usually provides lessons)--and that learning from it is pretty straightforward. The author, a professor at Harvard Business School, thinks both beliefs are misguided. In organizational life, she says, some failures are inevitable and some are even good. And successful learning from failure is not simple: It requires context-specific strategies. But first leaders must understand how the blame game gets in the way and must work to create an organizational culture in which employees feel safe admitting or reporting on failure. Failures fall into three categories: preventable ones in predictable operations, which usually involve deviations from spec; unavoidable ones in complex systems, which may arise from unique combinations of needs, people, and problems; and intelligent ones at the frontier, where "good" failures occur quickly and on a small scale, providing the most valuable information. Strong leadership can build a learning culture--one in which failures large and small are consistently reported and deeply analyzed, and opportunities to experiment are proactively sought. Executives commonly and understandably worry that taking an understanding stance on failure will create an "anything goes" work environment. They should instead recognize that failure is inevitable in today's complex work organizations.

Keywords: Learning; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Leadership; Business Processes; Organizational Culture; Failure; Opportunities;

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Edmondson, Amy C. "Strategies for Learning from Failure." Harvard Business Review 89, no. 4 (April 2011).

Today the most promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must break down silos and get people working together across boundaries. But that’s a challenge for many leaders. Employees naturally default to focusing on vertical relationships, and formal restructuring is costly, confusing, and slow. What, then, is the solution? Engaging in four activities that promote horizontal teamwork: (1) developing cultural brokers or employees who excel at connecting across divides; (2) encouraging people to ask questions in an open-ended, unbiased way that genuinely explores others’ thinking; (3) getting people to actively take other points of view; and (4) broadening employees’ vision to include more-distant networks. By supporting these activities, leaders can help employees connect with new pools of expertise and learn from and relate to people who think very differently from them. And when that happens, interface collaboration will become second nature.

Article | Manufacturing & Service Operations Management | Spring 2019

Fluid Teams and Knowledge Retrieval: Scaling Service Operations

Melissa A. Valentine, Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats and Amy C. Edmondson

To scale service operations requires retrieving knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository has the potential to help peripheral individuals gain access to valuable knowledge because it is universally available and can be used without social interaction. However, for it to successfully serve this equalizing function, those on the periphery of the organizational knowledge networks must actually use it, possibly overcoming barriers to doing so. In this paper, we develop a multilevel model of knowledge retrieval in teams to explore how individuals on the periphery of knowledge networks—because of their inexperience, location, lack of social capital, gender, or role—access knowledge from such a knowledge repository. Unexpectedly, we find that individuals whose experience and position already provide access to vital knowledge use a knowledge repository more frequently than individuals on the organizational periphery. We argue that this occurs because the knowledge repository—despite its appearance of equivalent accessibility—is actually more accessible to central than to peripheral players. Thus, knowledge retrieval is not driven primarily by the need to overcome limited access to other knowledge sources. Rather knowledge retrieval is facilitated when actors know how to reap value from the knowledge repository, which ironically improves with increasing access to other sources of knowledge. We conclude that a knowledge repository is unlikely to scale service operations without additional intervention.

Keywords: teaming; teams; Groups and Teams; Knowledge Management; Service Delivery; Knowledge Use and Leverage;

Citation:

Valentine, Melissa A., Tom Fangyun Tan, Bradley R. Staats, and Amy C. Edmondson. "Fluid Teams and Knowledge Retrieval: Scaling Service Operations." Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 21, no. 2 (Spring 2019): 346–360. View Details

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