In seeking to address complex problems, testing out different approaches is key. But the stigma of failure gets in the way of recognising and learning from failure. Although we can learn from pratice where there is sufficient trust to expose personal failures, where there isn't a shared experience of innovation (testing and learning rapidly), organisational learning from failure is unlikely. I suggest the need to develop new ways of collaborating to share unique and critical insights from failure in complex systems.

1. Failure as insights into complex systems: potential for adaptation
(resilience)
In this short paper I start to explore the relationship between personal learning and
when in complex systems, and how our attitudes towards failure can act as a
catalyst to both developing insights into and then adapting to changes in complex
systems, that generates organisational resilience. 1
I take the premise that failure can give us unique and critical insights, and the
emotional response to failure can make us want to stop and examine and make
sense of what has occurred. But the skill is in recognising that where we operate
in complex systems, that reflective process cannot be an internally focussed one;
we require more information about the context, to find the underlying issues,
before we can successfully determine how we need to respond.
I think there are some practical and cultural challenges to developing this practice.
I am seeking to draw attention to these as the basis for developing practice in this
area. I am guided by literature and practice in complexity theory, learning
organisations and generative learning, and community resilience 2 .
Reflective practice: key for learning from failure. Issue over scaling up from
defined to complex systems.
Our ability to engage in reflective practice kept coming out in my ‘Failure Files on
Tour’ 3 conversations this year, as critical to being able to learn from failure. Both
as a mindset of not letting failure become debilitating, that failure is natural, that it
is just a moment in time, part of the journey of development; and as a practical way
of being able to learn, and adapt your actions in response to failure.
But how does this individual capacity to learn from failure, to capitalise on all
opportunities, to adapt and so be resilient in the face of unintended 4
consequences of actions, play out in organisations and communities?
Where we are interested in how failure occurs as a combination of multiple agents
and factors, which is what happens when organisations or communities act 5 , we
need to be interested in making sense of these multiple and interconnected
activities. Hence reflective practice that involves a larger amount of information,
coming from a larger range of sources, to gain sufficient insight into that complex
system.
I am inspired by a number of people who in the course of ‘failure’ conversations
have talked about creating the space for dialogue about the impact of activities in
their organisations (what’s occurring).
1
I use the term organisation broadly, encompassing communities as well, unless otherwise stated.
2
In particular, Mitleton-Kelly, E.; Argyris, C, Schön, D, Weick, K, Jones, A.M., and Hendry, C.; Wheatley, M:
see endnotes.
3
RSA Glory of Failure: www.glory-of-failure.org/
4
We could also debate the happy accidents in innovation, that are positive rather than negative unintended
consequences.
5
High levels of interconnectivity are a feature of complex systems
1

2. The issue that appears, however, is the tension between size of organisation and
the ability to build trusting and emotionally mature relationships to enable
individuals to want to engage in a process that involves a level of vulnerability
(accepting the possibility of personal failure being part of organisational failure). It
is the fear of being judged by someone else’s standard of failure.
The more complex the issue or system which we operate in is, the greater the
connections with other agents, and so the need to involve more of them in the
dialogue over failure to make sense of it. However, in expanding the connections,
the less likely it is that we have the kind of trusted relationships with others that
give us confidence in exposing our vulnerabilities.
In relating it back to reflective practice, I can see three levels of information
required for action: from self-contained feedback loops for developing individual
skills, where you are practicing a new skill in a fairly stable environment; to
feedback in a more dynamic environment where it is not just the individual’s skills,
but the information needed to decide about application within the organisational
context; and then up to the mass of information required from a range of agents
working in a dynamic environment to improve things at an organisational system
level. 6
Meg Wheatly talks about the role of leaders in facilitating conversations with
increasingly diverse groups of people in order to work with the complexity that
exists in communities, to solve community problems, to build resilient communities
7
.
It’s easier to do this in small units because we can build these units around
common values. The skill is in working with a diverse group of people and still
engaging in meaningful dialogue about failure.
So how might we build trust in large organisations?
Or do we need to find a different approach for drawing together and making sense
of the critical insights from failure in complex systems? Which could be:
Anonymising the feedback – with limitations on the capacity for dialogue or sense-
making.
Keeping the core team looking at the failure relatively small and strongly bonded,
and add in a smaller number of additional agents – with limitations on the range of
insights. The additional agents might participate as if working within trusted
relationships if the behaviour of the core team demonstrates this.
6
This relates to Jones, A,M. and Hendry, C.’s work around the four levels of organisational learning, with
collaborative and generative being the two higher levels, that relate to my one here.
7
Wheatley, M. including in ‘Leadership and the New Science’ (1999)
2

3. Seeing the value of failure as critical and unique insights that overrides the
drivers to ignore it: How might we choose to collaborate and risk personal
loss for gain?
Recognising the value of learning from failure is critical to choosing to come
together.
If we are going to make this choice, we need to understand the balance between
the impetus to engage in dialogue over failure and question it in depth, in a way
that we don't have the incentive to where something is successful, which creates
the opportunity to uncover critical insights; and the impetus to ignore it because
the failure is too painful or we feel too vulnerable with others. 8
Do we hold the view that failure is not an endpoint, but it does give us direction? 9
That describing it as a failure helps is to clarify that it is not creating the desired
outcome 10 ; and we need to explore the failure because it gives us unique insights
into the conditions that mean we are not achieving our desired outcome.
Where there is a shared desire to move beyond the failure I can see the desire to
meet and learn.
However, often one of the features of complex problems is distributed leadership
and lack of connectivity amongst ownership of problem, ability to act, and impact of
problem 11 . Where this occurs, we frequently don’t have the right incentives in
place, and so this enable individuals to ignore the problem, the default position is
that they can, probably because they seem too difficult to solve and/or the system
failure is perceived as too much of a personal failure.
The Glory of Failure is all about creating a compelling case to learn collaboratively
about failure. Within this, I want to be able to demonstrate that there is intrinsic
value in learning from failure in complex systems, that is not dependent on
ownership of the complex problem, such that agents in complex systems will
choose to collaborate in order to do so.
Some of the questions that now follow from creating purpose in examining failure
are around the potential to act: what would give us confidence that insights gained
from taking the risk in examining failures collaboratively will be acted on?
(1) Signals that learning is a primary driver of organisational success: status
not tied up with superficial success but with impact over time.
I think the context of the organisation, as one where learning is valued and
connected with better outcomes for the organisation, is critical for demonstrating
that the organisation can act on the insights gained from examining failure at an
organisational level. We should not underestimate the division between theory
8
Stewart Lane’s point that the Glory of Failure offers a mechanism for examining failure when it is painful:
“taking the sting out of it”.
9
David Hillson describing failure as directional in chapter 2 of ‘The Failure Files’
10
A key theme from my chapter on failure in government, ‘The Failure Files’, is our ability to judge and
recognise failure, which I will return to.
11
See description of how this plays out in government, in chapter 10 of ‘The Failure Files’ (my chapter)
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4. and practice. The signals that leaders give out are key, and there is plenty of
literature that delves into this.
I don't think the nature of these activities should be prescribed, they have to be
appropriate for the organisational context. One I would like to highlight is William
Starling’s 12 idea of using semi-structured interviews when recruiting, that include
questions about ‘what I learnt from one of my failures’ as a method for the
organisation signalling that what is key is the learning not the act of failure. I see
this as being transformational in my organisation if as leaders we can be congruent
with this ask of others and our own ability to expose and learn from failure.
Two powerful examples that came out in ‘failure’ seminars this year exemplify this
leadership behaviour. Firstly, a company director talking about asking his staff
about their failures during the year at annual appraisals: “if you're not making
mistakes, you're not trying things out or stretching yourself, you’re just warming the
seat for eight hours a day.” Secondly, another director explaining the company’s
emotional maturity in sharing the “mistake of the week, cock-up of the month, and
disaster of the year” as a way of learning from failure.
In this way, the leadership signals and the organisational norms demonstrate the
fundamental value of learning for the organisation’s success. In accepting that
failure is natural, you are not setting the expectation of success that precludes any
failure. Personal success can include failure. Status is not derived from talking
solely about success.
(2) Creating the space for responding to failure insights: Recognising that
organisations need mechanisms for innovation (prototyping, experimenting)
In complex systems the process of determining what is going to be successful isn’t
simply the opposite of what determines the failure. Recognising failure is
directional in closing off certain approaches, but we have to keep testing out
different approaches.
Prof. Eve Mitleton-Kelly talks about the need for multiple micro-strategies: in
complex systems the context is critical and the impact of the intervention is
unpredictable, so it is wise to have a number of different approaches that can be
tested and adapted relatively quickly and easily.
So the question then becomes about creating and valuing space for
experimentation as part of a structured innovation process. Recognising that we
are testing and we need to adapt, rather than being fixed to a particular approach.
Being as clear as possible on the outcomes, but not tied to a particular method,
and clarifying the need to hold this uncertainty.
Without experience of seeing the positive outcomes of structured innovation
processes within organisations you are very unlikely to create the skills and find
the resources required to set these up.
12
Dr William Starling, FRSA, whose Doctorate was in failure in mechanical systems.
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5. Where government organisations act like monopolies, and the forces publicly
scrutinising policies are conservative and strong, it can be incredibly difficult if not
impossible to demonstrate this value, to get to any shared experience of it. 13
Innovation Units may be more effective when at arms length from government 14 .
However, this avoids my fundamental question about embedding a culture of
learning from failure in organisations.
Recognition of failure: tensions in describing emergent criteria and in
hierarchical organisations.
Finally, I want to return to the fundamental question of our ability to recognise
failure, both for organisations to be able to hear signals that actions are failing, and
in being able to judge whether the preferred course of action is likely to be
successful in a complex system.
I think the mechanisms for being attuned to signals that actions are failing are the
same as the ones described above for coming together to learn from failure and
respond to it: spaces where we reflect on and share insights into what is changing.
As Chris Argyris, Donald Schön, Karl Weick 15 and many others have explained so
well, we need to notice how the world is changing around us, the dynamics of
complex systems, as a first step in organisational sustainability. Seen in this way,
failure is a natural product of a dynamic world: the changing context means what
once was successful no longer is.
By making sense of the ‘noise’ together we are able to notice trends and, where
this process is sanctioned by the organisation, it can prevent the suppression of
feedback that isn't politically favourable. Tim Harford explains this very eloquently
in relation to US military operations in Iraq: that for political reasons the
government could not acknowledge the existence of insurgents, which meant their
strategy was ineffective. 16
In this case, the status of the leaders being derived from their ability to know more
or better than others (leader as hero) got in the way of the organisation being able
to listen out for, hear, and respond to failure.
Knowing when to judge that something is a failure or is failing is difficult in complex
systems because the development process has to be emergent, as it needs to be
based on the particular context, and therefore the indicators of success can’t be
fully fixed from the outset. In addition, the impact of our interventions often comes
quite a while afterwards.
So when questioning an intervention that is not achieving the desired outcome,
how can we know whether it is about timing, about needing to fine-tune the
approach, or whether there is a fundamental flaw?
13
See discussions about scrutiny in government within chapter 10 of ‘The Failure Files’ (my chapter)
14
Mulgan, G. (2009). See also various commentaries on ‘SkunkWorks’.
15
Argyris, C and Schön, D (1978). Weick, K (1995)
16
Tim Harford’s Ted Talk.
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6. How can we get better at determining how to judge if something is failing? If we
need it to be emergent, how does this hold with any propensity to ignore and hide
the failure?
Summary
In this paper I have started to explore our adaptive capability, why and how we
respond to failure, as how we get to success when working in complex systems,
because of the need to test out approaches based on the particular circumstances
and in recognising the impact of a dynamic environment.
I can see that being able to engage in reflective practice is a strong starting point,
and there are further issues I would like to explore:
Creating a compelling case for seeing the value of failure as unique and critical
insights, which enables individuals to choose to collaborate where it involves
personal risk, in order to solve complex problems.
Creating sufficient trust to explore failure with a wide range of individuals.
Creating cultural norms that connect learning with organisational outcomes, and
status being derived from success over time.
Valuing innovation processes, building on the basic but fundamental connections
between learning and organisational outcomes.
Developing practice for understanding and recognising when something is failing,
where the criteria are emergent.
My aim is that this short paper helps to create further dialogue and practice that
can be shared and applied.
Esmee Wilcox
esmeewilcox@yahoo.co.uk
@bk2thevalley
www.glory-of-failure.org/
With thanks to Roxanne Persaud (aka the Maid of Fail) for insightful feedback.
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7. References
Argyris, C. and Schön, D. (1978) Organisational Learning: A Theory of Action
Perspective. Addison Wesley Longman.
Jones, A.M. and Hendry, C (1992) The Learning Organisation: A Review of
Literature and Practice. Human Resource Development Partnership.
Harford, T. See the Ted talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiny7Ly6vhQ
Hillson, D. (ed.) (2011) The Failure Files. Triarchy Press.
Mitleton-Kelly, E.: see full list of publications at http://tinyurl.com/dlvqnw
Eve gave a seminar introducing complexity theory to a group of private and third
sector leaders in Ipswich in September 2009. I first met her through the ERSC
and LSE complexity seminars, at the ‘modelling for policy’ seminar in June 2009.
http://tinyurl.com/cjqdfut
Mulgan, G. (2009) The Art of Public Strategy: Mobilising Power and Knowledge for
the Common Good. Oxford University Press.
Weick, K. (1995) Sensemaking in Organisations. Sage Publications.
Wheatley, M.J. (1999) Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a
Chaotic World, and (2005) Finding Our Way. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
I heard Meg speak at a seminar for public, private and third sector leaders in
Ipswich in January 2010.
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