Failures as Learning Opportunities

Today's blog comes to us from Chris Graves, Training Captain/Paramedic of the Reno Fire Department. Chris has put together a short lesson on "Failures as Learning Opportunities" by benchmarking the healthcare industry.

Paul Iske on Brilliant Failures in Healthcare

• Watch Paul Iske's TEDxMasstricht video "Brilliant Failures in Healthcare."

 

Video Highlights:

• No progress without failures.
• In a world as complex and dynamic as ours, not everything is predictable.
• To find new ways for value creation, the approach of trial and error is sometimes the only way to make progress. However, often people are stimulated to reduce risk and to hide mistakes.
• Share your failures at the Institute of Brilliant Failures.

The Institute of Brilliant Failures Culture Checklist

 

The Institute of Brilliant Failures is in the process of developing a "Brilliant Failures Culture Checklist." Review the checklist and observe the simple relationship to principles of high reliability organizing.  The checklist will be built "around the following three key organizational development themes related to a "Brilliant Failure Attitude:"

1. Easing off the 'control button.' Control tends to suppress evolutionary, spontaneous processes. The windows of opportunity that arise are left unexplored with no option to capitalize on their potential. To counter this organizations need to examine where they could control less and navigate more.
2. Encouraging the right type of risk taking. Many organizations, and employees, tend to play safe, to stay in their comfort zones. As a result they take implicitly or explicitly take at the low end of the risk-return trade off. To counter this organizations need to examine where, and what type of risk taking, they want to encourage.
3. Recognizing the value of, and learning from, failure. Many organizations tend to either brush failure under the carpet or punish those responsible. In this respect the brilliant failure attitude is: 'there is no such thing as failure only feedback.' Organizations need to put processes in place to recognize the value of 'failure' and maximize the learning from this.

(The information above was taken from the Institute of Brilliant Failures website.)

 Brilliant Failures Case Studies

• Read the Institute's brilliant failures case study analyses. (Each follows a familiar format reminiscent of AARs. The identification of intent was the set-apart from the AAR standard four questions.)