Innovation requires accepting setbacks as part of progress.
Unfortunately, setbacks are ugly. They sound fine in theory, but they never feel that way. The actual event is often harsh and unforgiving. To transform a setback into something we can learn from or reflect on, we have to change the way we think about it.
Here are 5 activities to embrace as a team to use setbacks as a tool for achieving your goals.
Figure out what went wrong
Figuring out what went wrong needs to be a team priority. If you can’t articulate a failure, you’re more likely to repeat it in the future.
Engineering teams at Google conduct Postmortems to learn what they can from an incident. It involves figuring out the impact, root causes, and follow-up actions to prevent the issue from happening ever again. Their philosophy involves ensuring documenting and understanding all the factors that contributed to a problem to build solutions that reduce the likelihood of a issue surfacing again. Failure at Google is treated as a learning opportunity for the entire company, not a punishment.
The military conducts After Action Reports (AAR) to analyze missions after they’re completed. It doesn’t matter if the mission was successful or not, the AAR helps teams improve future missions by distilling an effort down to its learnings through analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the operation.
And if you don’t have time for that much structure, spend time asking “why” until reach the root cause. Knowing what went wrong and what led to it is a powerful way to identify any shortcomings in your process, technology, environment, or decision-making skills.
Review and update your goals
Some failures are created by goals with the wrong targets.
The performance of a team relies heavily on the incentives the team has to be successful. If the reward for accomplishing something is attractive, the group will naturally be more interested and productive toward getting it done. When the reward is loosely defined or boring, teams are less likely to give their best effort.
Well-written goals create better incentives for a team to achieve something great.
When you encounter failure:
- Review if your goals played into the outcome.
- Update any related goals to take into account everything you learned about the failure.
Always make sure the way you reward your team aligns with the behavior you want to establish.
Role-play the scenario again
After the dust settles, gather your teammates to conduct a role-play of the mission/situation again.
Work through the scenario as it started and talk through different decisions and pathways to find any glaring assumptions or problems that contributed to the poor outcome. Have everyone explain any decisions and actions in detail to discover their thought process.
Remember: everyone processes information differently. Big failures often involve a game of professional telephone.
Allowing space to explore how your teammates interpreted different events helps you broaden your understanding for future work together.
At every milestone in the effort, explore some or all of these elements:
| Factor | |
|---|---|
| Communication | The outcomes of the mission were not clear to everyone involved. |
| Leadership | Decision-making was slow or indecisive, leading to confusion and delayed action. |
| Planning | Insufficient contingency planning resulted in an inability to adapt to unexpected events or challenges. |
| Resource Management | Inadequate allocation of resources (time, budget, personnel) hindered the project's progress. |
| Technical Expertise | A lack of technical knowledge led to incorrect implementation or misunderstanding of critical components. |
| Coordination | Poor inter-departmental or inter-team coordination resulted in misaligned efforts and duplicated work. |
| Risk Assessment | Failure to identify or adequately address potential risks led to unforeseen issues and delays. |
| Time Management | Unrealistic deadlines or poor time management resulted in rushed work or missed milestones. |
| Change Management | Inability to effectively manage change, such as personnel turnover or shifting priorities, disrupted progress. |
| External Factors | Uncontrollable external factors, such as market conditions or regulatory changes, impacted the project. |
| Organizational Culture | A culture of fear or blame discouraged open communication, hindering problem-solving and innovation. |
Share lessons as a specific presentation
What good is knowledge if it doesn’t help anyone?
Put together a formal workshop or slide deck to share with others about what went wrong. Put your ego to the side and cover the main takeaways in a format that could help other teams (or your own team) later.
Treating failure as undesirable is a quick way to repeat the mistakes of the past. Organizing opportunities for others to ask questions and share their perspectives on an incident helps spread knowledge and make it okay to fall short in the pursuit of growth.
Not every incident warrants large-scale knowledge sharing, but every incident warrants documented reflection.
Red team future efforts
A Red Team is an internal group in your organization with the sole purpose of finding all the gaps in your plan or reasoning for an operation or mission.
It’s a structured process used by the military to challenge and stress-test plans, strategies, and assumptions by simulating the perspective of an adversary or competitor.
The primary goal of Red Teaming is to identify vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and blind spots that may not be apparent during conventional planning and analysis. By understanding potential threats and challenges from an opponent's perspective, organizations can develop more robust and resilient strategies.
Red Teams are encouraged to think creatively and adopt unconventional approaches to problem-solving. This can involve considering worst-case scenarios, devising alternative strategies, and questioning established assumptions to identify potential issues that may be overlooked during traditional planning processes.
One of the bigget benefits of this exercise is how thoughtful it forces you to be in your planning. The teams creating the strategy easily forget about certain aspects because they’re “too close” to everything that’s happening. Red Teaming sets up a Devil’s Advocate group to intentionally sus out any weak points of your effort before they’re exposed during “combat.”