Adaptive Leaders Drive Innovation Via Failure Forward

Innovative leaders know how to foster innovation and tackle tough problems in an increasingly complex economy. One key to success is to embrace trial and error, develop the courage to risk and know failure–and adapt from those failures with adjustments - Accept Risk of Failure.

Innovative leaders face some challenges in large organizations. Big companies offer an attractive machine for carrying out correct decisions, the power of a team all pulling in the same direction, and clear responsibilities producing a proper flow of information up and down the chain of command. But, every one of these assets can become a liability…the big picture can become a self-deluding propaganda poster, the unified team retreats into group think, and the chain of command becomes a hierarchy of wastebaskets, perfectly evolved to prevent feedback from reaching the top.”

Adaptive and innovative leadership focuses on accepting and tolerating failure. Here are three tips toward adaptive and innovative leadership:

• Try new things with the expectation that some experiments will fail.
• Make failure survivable…because it will be common.
• And make sure you know when you’ve failed. When you rationalize or delude yourself about your mistakes, you tend to compound them by making stupid decisions in an effort to deny the failure ever happened (this is why people lose money at casinos).

Have you ever embraced risk of failure, and how has it helped you?