Gamers are changing our view of failing at work

Wisdom Games CEO, Raymond de Villiers

Every life lesson that we have learned has impressed one message home on us: ‘When you succeed at something you are a winner and a hero.  Failure is for losers, and is to be avoided at all costs’.  We are however, living in times of change and one of these changes is the evolution of a new view of failure.

In all armies of the world there is a code that soldiers live by that they will never leave a colleague behind.  If a member of the team gets wounded the whole team works together to get them out of the situation, alive.  When they return to safety, the military acknowledges the sacrifice by giving a medal for bravery.  The corporate model is currently exactly the opposite.  If someone fails at something [injured in the line of duty] they are promptly dispatched to the unemployment line.

Rather than value the experience gained through failure, as the military does, the corporate message is that failure is unacceptable.  In an environment like this it is no wonder that there is risk aversion in the corporate ranks with no one prepared to lay their life on the line to push the boundaries and innovate. This is beginning to change with failure being acknowledged as part of the path to innovation success.

The company that is most effectively learning from failure is 3M, arguably the most innovative company in the world.  3M has an internal ‘Failure Forum’.  The purpose of the forum is to create a safe space to share failures, with two desired outcomes –

1. That others can learn from the failure and not repeat it needlessly;
2. To receive input from the experience of others that could help in overcoming the failure.

One innovator discussing his failed attempt at the creation of a new type of glue sparked the application of this ‘failed’ product to the back of little pieces of paper resulting in one of 3M’s most famous products – ‘Post-it Notes’.

3M may have got the ball rolling in bringing a new philosophy of failure into the corporate world, but there is a generational trend developing that will allow all organizations to successfully tap into this resource. At the end of 2004 John Beck and Mitchell Wade from Harvard published a book based on their research into a group they labelled ‘The Gamer Generation’.  The central point of the book was that Generations X and Y [Millennial generation] have grown up with electronic games as an integral part of their psycho-social development.  Consequently, the gaming experiences of this group have had an impact on how they view the world.

One of the findings that came out of the research was that gamers had a totally different view of failure to non-gamers.  In the older generations failure carried a stigma that was avoided, in the younger generations however, failure was a virtual non-issue.  The reasoning related to the ‘Game Over’ experience of electronic games – when you fail you go back to begin and just start over.

It is in this attitude that the value of this generation’s view can be tapped.  When they get to the point in the game where they failed last time they make sure that they try something else, until eventually they succeed and move on to the next level.  Through trial and error, this generation’s view of failure is that it is one of the steps toward ultimate success.  The gamers always believe in their eventual success and each failure is a valuable learning experience toward that end.

The implications of this worldview for the corporate world are significant. Never before has a generation entered the workforce with such a positive view of failure.  The workplace will soon be filled with individuals who not only have the skills to learn from failure, but who also have the desire to.  If we accept that failure is part and parcel of the DNA of innovation, then we have a generation coming into the workforce that has the potential to be the most innovative and creative ever.

Innovation success will increasingly be unlocked not by understanding our past successes and making a formula to be followed, but by using the insights of our failures to break the mould and do something new.

Guest Post by Raymond de Villiers of Wisdom Games.

[cb type="company"]3M[/cb]