How Coca-Cola, Netflix, and Amazon Learn from Failure
Encourage your team to embrace mistakes.
Founders need to accept “some” failure as an option! Think about it; the people who sit behind a desk doing virtually nothing will almost “never” make mistakes. Simply because they are doing nothing worth anything! You need to have an appetite for risk, and more importantly: the stomach for it! People who are at the leading edge and experiment with “new:” things are bound to make mistakes! And, you learn from your mistakes and find better ways of not doing it again the next time (That means if you understand the causal importance of your mistakes..) It is a well known fact that “taking risks” is risky! Duh! that’s logical right? But many don’t understand this process.
Usually successes are based on the willingness to face up to the likelihood of mistakes and missteps. One of the greatest great challenge that stand in the way of companies (and startups) and individuals is being more honest about failure. The “omission bias” as labelled by Patrick Doyle, CEO of Domino’s Pizza is the reality that most people with a new idea choose not to pursue the idea because if they try something and it doesn’t work, the setback might damage their career or even their startup! The other challenge is to overcome “loss aversion” — the tendency for people to play not to lose rather than play to win, because for most of us, “The pain of loss is double the pleasure of winning.”
So don’t forget, if you want to move forward you need to accept that “Failure is definitely an option!”
HBR Article: https://hbr.org/2017/11/how-coca-cola-netflix-and-amazon-learn-from-failure