Fail early and often
As mentioned last month, I came across a new book—An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey—which builds a strong case for using “errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth.” Amen.
This isn't revolutionary stuff for those of us in the "fail fast" school who believe that screwing up—quickly and even badly—is a necessary condition of successful innovation. But Kegan and Lahey take it a step further and build an organizational philosophy around celebrating flaws and weaknesses.
The authors give examples of successful businesses, fanatically committed to personal development, that encourage managers and employees to stop hiding their limitations and to use them as opportunities to develop both themselves and their companies. In these environments, “People’s limitations are seen as their growing edge,” the authors assert. But these limitations have to be mined. “Weaknesses are pure gold if we will only dig into them.”
It reminded me of some successful rock groups who were acutely aware of their constraints but overcame them early and used the lessons from those failures to become massively successful.