http://www.europeanbusinessreview.com 51littered with stories of misjudgement, companies
doggedly pursuing the wrong strategies, throwing
good money after bad, and simply getting it wrong.
Think New Coke. Remember how, at the beginning
of the century, Webvan promised to change the
way Americans bought groceries. It established a
network of warehouses across the country. But then
the customers didn’t materialise. It failed slowly and
on a grand scale (with losses of over $800 million).
But, despite the fact that failure is a constant
presence in life inside and outside organisations,
individuals and organisations are ill equipped to deal
with it. Faced with failure, people are likely to bury
their heads in the organisational sand rather than
admitting things are going wrong. Plowing on is an
instinctive reaction for many when they are faced
with failure. Others abandon ship, heading in the
opposite direction at the earliest opportunity.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT FAILURE
So, what needs to happen for individuals and
organisations to have a more productive relation-
ship with failure? We believe three things are key:
1
Recognise that plans cannot be set in stone
Plans are extremely important. Without them
you don’t know where you are going, what you
are doing and why. However, in some organisations,
plans are as static as a photograph. They are fatally
tethered to an out-of-date context. We tend to make
assumptions about the future and sometimes ingen-
uously believe all will happen naturally. Sometimes,
we just don't have goals, we merely have a set of
hypotheses that need to be tested.
The saying that no plan survives contact with the
enemy is forever being proved true. Managers must
develop robust plans but allow for missteps along
the way, and be able and willing to adapt the plan as
fast as possible. The challenge for organisations is to
create innovative strategies which are not organisa-
tional straitjackets.
The ideal state could be described as dynamic
stability. An organisation must be constantly
reviewing and appraising the reality; and be willing
to change things as they go along. Agile prac-
tices can help teams develop a more flexible and
effective approach to planning, by adopting short
feedback loops, frequent adaptation of processes,
reprioritisation, update plans constantly, and
frequent delivery.^4 As research shows,^5 devel-
oping agile competences at all levels will help the
organisation to promptly and effectively reallo-
cate funding and personnel among initiatives.
They can also rapidly adjust when implementa-
tion reveals new risks or opportunities.
Recognition that plans cannot be set in stone but
need to be more fluid is growing. Consider the Dutch
financial company, ING Group. It has embarked
on an organisational transformation to create what
it calls “One Way of Working”.^6 This programme
aims to incorporate agile methodology principles to
improve flexibility, accelerate innovation with shorter
time to market, minimise handovers, and provide
employees with greater freedom and responsibility.
At ING, failure is becoming productively normal-
ised rather than silently accepted. Some of its most
ambitious programmes have had to change course.
In extreme cases, programmes are completely
halted, another path taken or the approach funda-
mentally changed.
ING relies on frequent review cycles and fast
escalation procedures to identify which teams
are stalling or need to be adjusted, as well as the
root causes of a project delay or derailment. The
focus is then on resolving the issue immediately.
“If your projects take too long, cost too much
money and don’t give you the agility to fail fast,The ideal state could be described as dynamic
stability. An organisation must be constantly
reviewing and appraising the reality; and bewilling to change things as they go along.