Bonuses for failing?
We can’t innovate without failure and anyone with a vision for transformation that requires great strides forward recognizes that failures along the way are not only inevitable, but are a valuable learning tool.
As Thomas Edison reportedly said when trying to create a light bulb: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Transformative figures with that kind of vision embark on what we’ve come to call “moonshots” – so named after President Kennedy’s audacious pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
Google’s “X”, the company’s R&D lab that attempts “moonshots” or projects that tackle problems that affect millions of people, is headed by Astro Teller, and is working on projects like the Google driverless car, Google glass, balloon powered Internet, etc. It is hard not to be enamored by these emerging “moonshots” which are taking on massive challenges in our society.
In this Backchannel article “The Secret to Moonshots? Killing our Projects,” Teller describes how the secret to these successes are the hundreds of failures that preceded them.
From afar, the culture in an R&D lab can seem mystical, exciting, and adrenalin inducing. Imagine a culture where you wake up with the ability to try, fail, reinvent and try again. Up close, the process of innovation is quite messy.
Human nature includes fear of failure and fear of the unknown. We naturally gravitate toward the path of least resistance. How do you incentivize people to take on such massive endeavors and the inevitable rounds of failure they will entail?
“The only way to get people to tackle audacious ideas AND get them to run at the hardest parts of the problem first is if doing that is the path of least resistance,” says Teller. “We work hard at X to make it safe to fail. We killed over 100 investigations last year alone. I didn’t kill them. The teams themselves killed each one. And teams kill their ideas as soon as the evidence is on the table because they’re rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. Hugs and high fives from their manager. They get promoted because of it. We’ve bonused every single person in teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than thirty.”
Bonuses for failing? Apparently rigorous skepticism is not the enemy of boundless optimism, but its perfect partner.
At Matchbook Learning we are going to create our own R&D lab experiment, one in which teachers themselves will identify ways to create new experiences and make Matchbook a place where they want to continue to learn and grow for many years to come. Instead of failure not being an option, it should be one actively rewarded. The rejection of some ideas will lead to better and more successful new ideas.
