In the video “Is Failure Necessary?” while responding to the question “Why is failure important for INNOVATION and SUCCESS?” Simon Sinek says that you cannot have innovation or progress without failure. If you truly aren't failing as you're trying to innovate, then you're probably not pushing very hard because you haven't broken anything and you're making very very safe choices. He met a CFO once and asked him about the priorities of the company and the CFO said “Efficiency and Innovation”, he laughed and said, “Well, good luck with that” because innovation is inherently inefficient, it requires experimentation and experimentation requires failure. We overuse the term failure and the problem with the word “failure” is that it's like the word “cancer”, it's too broad. If you have stage four liver cancer or you have mild melanoma, both are called cancer but they are clearly not the same thing. Similarly, some people think failure means experimentation but a lot of people think failure means catastrophe and so, when we tell our company that failure is good, “Fail fast”, that literally scares people. Therefore, we need a new word, we want to avoid failure, failure is catastrophic and it should be avoided but we should encourage “falling”. When a kid falls off a bicycle, we don't tell them they failed, we tell them they fell and we tell them to get back up and try again. So, we should fall and fall often, and the quality of the innovation is judged not necessarily by whether you fell but by how quickly you can pick yourself back up and try again.
While responding to the question “How can we challenge old ideas in the workplace?”, he says that over the course of time some of the process becomes calcified and we follow it because we've just always followed it and nobody really knows why it's there. To challenge that, all it takes is one person to say, “Can somebody explain to me why we do it this way” and if nobody has an answer then it's right to be changed or at least challenged. We should allow people who question something, to give them open space, to feel heard rather than litigated, and if they have legitimate cause to change the process, to let them experiment on their team, with their group and try something new and if it works, great and if it doesn't work then it's good, that's fine too. It's not just about speaking out, it's also about hearing it and allowing people to even challenge it sometimes if they have a better option.
While responding to the question “What are some skills that we should RELEARN or UNLEARN post-pandemic?” He says that we need to RELEARN the importance of just sort of being around people, some of us got good at virtual and being separated and we have to relearn the importance of having a meeting in person and having a brainstorming in person. Further, what we need to UNLEARN is being constantly connected, learning to turn things off.
