Failing By Design - Response

Failing By Design by Rita Gunther McGrath - Response

Quote:

“If you accept this premise, the choice before you is simple: Continue to use practices that limit what you can gain from failures—or embrace the concept of intelligent failure, in which learning can create substantial value. (…) Leaders must be willing to talk about failures and what was learned from them” (McGrath).

Response:

          We’ve all been there; we’ve seen failure and success in our lives, yet we sometimes beat ourselves up over various shortcomings in life.  Those failures and shortcomings, big or small, are very important if they are recognized and dealt with intelligently.  It is then that we can transcend the small bubbles we are trapped in that contain our fears and anxieties of failure.  We can then become bigger risk takers and intelligent thinkers and leaders.  In the reading, Failing By Design by Rita Gunther McGrath, I thought about failures in places other than big businesses and companies.  I feel that we as a society are taught at a very young age, especially in the school system, that failure is bad.  Yet, once we progress in the “school-system” so to speak, we learn that failures are always going to come.  So why is it that institutions, such as schools, continue to frown upon failure?  It is not helping children and young adults recognize the fact that intelligent failure can be a good thing.  If any of them want to run Fortune 500 businesses, they will need to experience failure in their life and if they cannot transform their mode of thought from failure being bad, to it being a positive means of growth, then they will not able to lead that company. It is very interesting to me, the culture shock of changing modes of thought.  You are taught that failure is detrimental to the educational journey, and it damn well shows on a transcript, further limiting a student.  Of course, if they are willing to embrace intelligent failure they will learn from their “mistake” and take more risks, but at what cost?  It is the fear of failure itself that limits what the mind can do and create.  Leaders of businesses as well as other individuals are always combating that notion and trying to overcome it, even though that very failure can sometimes be a good thing.

Questions:

    1) Why is it that failure is seen as important in the “real world” of technology, etc. when the same notion in the school system is frowned upon?  There is always going to be failure according to McGrath, if that happens in the school system (as a final grade for example) it is detrimental to the progression the student has, therefore limiting them.

2) How much failure is “too much failure”?  What denotes the limit of failure?  Is it different, say, in various fields?

3) It seems as though media dramatizes the notion of failure and successes of companies, for example, to almost polar opposite qualities - does that have an effect on how things are handled and the reputation of the company?  (e.g. Apple releasing a flop-product)

Failing By Design. By: McGrath, Rita Gunther, Harvard Business Review, 00178012,

Apr2011, Vol. 89, Issue 4