If we adopt a growth mindset (Professor Carol Dweck), many failures, struggles and mistakes are celebrated and encouraged. However, Professor Amy Edmondson, famous for her work on psychological safety, describes two types of failures that are less worthy of celebration:
Preventable failures
Complex failures
According to Professor Amy Edmondson, ‘These are problematic, and those are the kinds that happen when we have a clear process or set of steps or guidelines that we're supposed to follow that reliably yield a particular result, and for whatever reason, those processes were not followed, and a failure happened. Those are not worthy of celebration’.
‘These failures occur where we are in reasonably familiar territory doing reasonably familiar work, but some combination of unique factors happened and produced a problem or produced an accident. We don't celebrate those either’.
Professor Amy Edmondson believes there is a third type of failure that is worth celebrating – Intelligent failures.
‘These are the result of thoughtful risks, thoughtful calculations about things that might work, that might result in some new value that we really want, and yet often don't. Intelligent failures happen when we're exploring something new on purpose, taking that calculated risk, and alas, we were wrong’.
The next time you plan on offering feedback to someone who has ‘failed’, use the information you have available to determine what type of failure you believe the situation is. Rather than basing the conversation around what you believe went wrong, ask the other person:
‘How are you feeling about the situation?’
‘Is there anything we can learn from the situation?’
‘How can we look at the situation through a grey lens, rather than an all or nothing, black or white, success or failure lens?’
‘Can we find degrees of success in certain aspects of the situation?’
(And, if you think the failure is an Intelligent failure), ‘Is there anything we can celebrate?’