How do you foster innovation in your organization? Most organizations are more worried about making mistakes than the potential upside benefit. So the key is in taking the initiative, and managing your mistakes.
Rita McGrath, Professor, Columbia Business School gives this advice: Recognize that you can’t measure the rate of failure, but you can manage the cost, so manage the cost of your mistakes and benefit from them. You can have a lot of failures if they are cheap. In short: fail cheaply.
And these days you can fail more cheaply than ever before, so it’s a good time to push the boundaries and explore new ground, whether it’s developing new services, finding new funding methods, launching new fundraising events, exploring partnerships or collaborations or getting your feet wet in social media.
And if you fail in your pursuit of progress, take note of the lessons. You paid the tuition, so benefit from it. Recognize the things that you have learned that can make you more competitive in your core mission or that can be used by someone else.
WAKE UP CALL: Are you willing to create a new measurement of success for your organization – one that can take on new challenges, fail fast, cheap and move on? Set a new standard by judging your success by the amount of learning, willingness to grow, progress toward a goal and ability to stop and move on to something else when it’s not working.
RESOURCE: www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-91LvoyAZo&feature=channel
