Why IT Failure Is Key to Success

I think CEOs should be screened for ethics and integrity - after all they will be responsible for not only the lives of all the employees but the very life of the organization!  And yes their pay should be tied to performance as well.

Agreed that people should be compensated based on their performance. What other way is there to compensate them? If this were held to, we would not see enormous payouts to CEOs, even to those fired for not doing the job well.

And surely, performance has to be tempered with reality. When, as you point out, Mitch, a project fails, it is often because it could not have succeeded with even the best help.

Then again, sometimes a project fails not for lack of effort but for lack of the properly focused effort.

As an old editor of mine once said, "It doesn't matter if you're working hard, if you're not doing the right things." Part of competence is knowing what the right things are.

@Mitch - very good examples.

Seems to me that risk management for failure is simple -- but not necessarily easy. 

Keep the cost of failure relatively small related to the overall size of the business. A $1 billion company won't suffer badly if a $1 million experimental project fails. 

Start experiments small, build on success, and regroup or retreat from failure. 

taimur_tz - I think one of the ways to go about it is to reward people on the basis of their efforts rather than the outcomes they produce.

That doesn't seem right to me -- or practical. We need to reward the high performers more. Otherwise, they'll go elsewhere. 

It's more a case that we need to look at an employee's entire career history, and not focus on a single failure. 

I've seen organizations where high-performance workers were moved to experimental projects, and then laid off when the projects were shut down. This sends a clear message to the surviving employees: Next time you're asked to volunteer for an experimental project, decline. 

Instead, what would have happened if the workers on that experimental project had been evaluated based on their entire careers, which may have included many years of success? And also evaluated based on their work -- which may have been what you were suggesting -- rather than necessarily evaluating based on the results. 

I remember a conversation with a doctor who was looking into developing metrics for quality-of-care at healthcare facilities. He said the first instinct in a case like that is to look at survival rates. After all, if a high percentage of patients checking into a facility die, that must mean the facility is terrible? And yet such a measure would simply reward healthcare providers for refusing to treat the seriously ill and injured. 

@everyone - sorry for my delay in responding. Lost power and had to pull a long work day.  Fine now.  Hope everyone is doing well.  I enjoyed all the comments and responses - what a great discussion! Looks like everyone recognizes that when you are trying something that has never been done before, even a failure is important knowledge - never to be shoved aside. Success rests on the shoulders of all failed attempts. Think of the people who left copius notes and calculations related to their failed attempts which the Wright brothers used to find their final successful solution.  Yes the trick is to manage the risks and costs at managable levels so that when success is achieved, it pays back for all the failures and more. So yes my point was that in such a creative field like IT, leaders must provide a balanced environment which promotes innovation.  Innovation is what allows organizations to make gigantic leaps forward. This innovation comes from the brains of our organizations. We cannot afford to suppress those brains.

Perhaps terminology is an issue here. There is a line between failure and simple uselessness. Sometimes projects don't need to create waste or havoc to be proven ineffective.

I'm still convinced success is largely a matter of luck, being in the right place at the right time and not much more. Sure, there's a matter of having some skill to at least arrive in time, but in the end there are more failures than huge wins.

To penalize failure, which may be just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is just ignoring the statistics, and throwing away valuable assets.

Paul Whyte: Yes, to making acceptable Failure a tool of success, we must manage failure efficiently.