In an interview of Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author Eric Ries with Mckinsey, he talks about an interesting concept of ‘Productive failure’. He details it out as:
“Put on your employees’ performance evaluation a concept we call productive failure: ‘How many productive failures did you have this year?’ If someone comes to you and claims that they didn’t fail this year, you know one of two things: they’re either lying to your face or they were incredibly, unbelievably conservative.”
In both cases, it’s actually not a positive attribute. You want to say, “Show me a time when you failed but learned something really valuable, or were able to pivot from something that didn’t work to something that did.”
How often do we emphasize this attribute of taking risks, showing creativity and executing innovating ideas? How often we appreciate failures during that process and in fact, reward them?
If one truly wants to develop a culture of innovation, measuring ‘productive failure’ becomes an imperative.