The cult of failure, the belief that by failing we succeed, has some very real and adverse consequences if taken literally. It gives excuses to those who would choose to be sloppy in their consideration and preparation of an experiment, behaviour that would get you thrown out of Edisons labs, but in management can now get you accolades.
Giving permission to fail without allocating any consequences sounds fine, but can lead to sloppy thinking. This guest post by Steven Parker on the Businessgrow blog republished on Stevens untimely death says it all.
My Dad used to say “every-one makes mistakes, but only a fool makes the same one twice”. This has implicit in it the value of the learning, but now so often see the “learning” part dismissed as too hard, ego driven dills seem to think they now have a licence to stuff up repeatedly, and avoid doing the hard post stuff-up analysis to understand why something went wrong, did not deliver the expected results, had “unexpected consequences”.
Often those consequences are because no sensible forward thinking was done, no basic risk assessment was in place, because “to experiment” has become a cliche, not a discipline.
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