Earlier today, I was listening to a panel discussion and something that one of the panelist, Bharathi Vishwanathan, said, stuck a chord with me. She is the chief digital and information officer at Suntory.
She said and I quote:
Failure is an option, fear is not
– Bharathi Vishwanathan
She said that this was the motto of her company.
When I think about it, it makes a lot of sense, specially if you want to innovate and create a culture of experimentation and exploration.
I have written about this many many times that there is no innovation possible if failure is frowned upon. The very definition of innovation is to try things, some of them will work and some of them will not.
You will be surprised at the amount of creativity and innovation that can be unleashed just planning letting people know that it is okay to try something new and that it is okay to fail as long as we learn something from that experience.
It is not enough to just learn from the experience but also to share it with everyone else so that we can learn as a team.
Unfortunately, while everyone wants and expect innovation, not many people allow for experimentation and exploration.
In many cultures failure of any sorts is unacceptable. It is in such cultures but employees are afraid of trying anything new, of taking initiative, of exploring new things.
In short, fear reigns. And when that happens, you can expect the organisation’s performance will get into a steep decline and possibly end many careers, if not kill the entire organisation.
As leaders, we owe it to our team to create an environment devoid of fear. We owe it to our people to create an environment where they can flourish by bringing their curiosity and allow them to experiment and explore things that are relevant for us as a team, to find better ways of achieving the outcomes that we are trying to achieve.
This sense of achievement makes people feel good about themselves and people feel good about themselves perform much better. So it is in our interest and our organisations, to help them be better, do better and therefore perform better.
