Evading Failure

The Tin Man Behavior

Treating all failures as equal, as inefficient, a threat to short-term goals (such as stock price), and therefore an outcome to be avoided or to be penalized if it happens.

The Results

• ·A risk-averse culture
• ·Suppression of experimentation, creative problem-solving, and learning
• ·Bigger failures from avoiding small, controlled experiments

How Octopus Organizations Behave Instead

• ↳They treat intelligent failure as valuable data, a necessary and expected by-product of innovation.
• ↳They systematically lower the cost of failure by running many small, fast, and inexpensive experiments.
• ↳They believe the best way to avoid catastrophic failure is to embrace small, controlled, and intelligent failures.