Harvard Business Review Special Issues Summer 2022

IN APRIL 2011, Harvard Business Review published an issue on failure; it’s become one of our most revisited volumes. In his opening reflections, editor-in-chief Adi Ignatius called out a commonplace hypocrisy: Everyone talks about failure as necessary to learning, growth, and success, but we avidly avoid and punish it in real life. Now failure—as both a strategy and a problem—feels like it’s on everyone’s minds more than ever. With the global pandemic placing seemingly endless obstacles before us and with expectations for performance higher than ever, setbacks for organizations loom large. Meanwhile uncertainty and rapid change have only deepened the need for organizations to fail fast. In this volume we’ve collected the best of our articles on failure—what it is, its effect on us, how to recover from it, and how to…

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THE ANNALS OF business history are full of tales of companies that once dominated their industries but fell into decline. The usual reasons offered—staying too close to existing customers, a myopic focus on short-term financial performance, and an inability to adapt business models to disruptive innovation—don’t fully explain how the leaders who had steered these firms to greatness lost their touch. In this article we argue that success can breed failure by hindering learning at both the individual and the organizational level. We all know that learning from failure is one of the most important capacities for people and companies to develop. Yet surprisingly, learning from success can present even greater challenges. To illuminate those challenges—and identify approaches for overcoming them—we will draw from our research and from the work of…

ONE OF THE most important—and most deeply entrenched—reasons why established companies struggle to grow is fear of failure. Indeed, in a 2015 Boston Consulting Group survey, 31% of respondents identified a risk-averse culture as a key obstacle to innovation. Senior executives are highly aware of this problem. On one hand, they recognize the usefulness of failure. As 3M’s legendary chairman William McKnight once said, “The best and hardest work is done in the spirit of adventure and challenge…Mistakes will be made.” Pixar’s president, Ed Catmull, has a similar point of view. “Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil,” he has said. “They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new.…and should be seen as valuable.” On the other hand, management processes for budgeting, resource allocation, and risk control are built…

Pharmaceutical companies operate in a highstakes environment where the rewards for successful innovation are huge, but the vast majority of drug discovery projects fail. As a leading player in the industry, Roche is always on the lookout for ways of working that will help it get the right balance between risk taking and caution. To capture the benefits of experimentation, a cross-business team at Roche launched an initiative in 2015 implementing individual project-failure reviews. They identified 10 teams (of six to 15 people) working in different parts of the company and asked the leader of each to conduct a three‑month pilot. In kickoff meetings, groups were reminded of the importance of learning from failure and then asked to discuss a recent failed project. At two to four more follow-up meetings, team members…

IT’S HARDLY NEWS that business leaders work in increasingly uncertain environments. Nor will it surprise anyone that under uncertain conditions, failures are more common than successes. And yet, strangely, we don’t design organizations to manage, mitigate, and learn from failures. When I ask executives how effective their organizations are at learning from failure, on a scale of one to 10, I often get a sheepish “Two—or maybe three” in response. As this suggests, most organizations are profoundly biased against failure and make no systematic effort to study it. Executives hide mistakes or pretend they were always part of the master plan. Failures become undiscussable, and people grow so afraid of hurting their career prospects that they eventually stop taking risks. I’m not going to argue that failure per se is a…