Simon Sinek argues that innovation requires experimentation, which means falling and getting back up, not failing. Organizations need leaders who let teams run small pilot tests and recover quickly from setbacks. He also says the pandemic made us forget why offices matter: interruptions spark ideas, and commutes help us decompress.
Chapters
You cannot have innovation or progress without failure. It doesn't exist. And if you truly aren't failing as you're trying to innovate, then you're probably not pushing very hard because you haven't broken anything. You're taking. You're making very, very safe choices. We could never have put a person on the moon without a bunch of rockets blowing up first. Like, of course.
I met a CFO once. I asked him the priorities at the company, and he said, efficiency and innovation. And I laughed and said, well, good luck with that. Innovation is inherently inefficient because it requires experimentation. Experimentation requires failure.
Much is said about fail fast. I actually don't like the term that we. I think we overuse the term failure.
The problem with the word failure is, is it's like the word cancer. It's too broad. Like, if you have stage four liver cancer or you have a mild melanoma, those things are both called cancer, but they are clearly not the same thing. And the same thing is when we hear the word failure, some people think failure means experimentation, but a lot of people think failure means catastrophe. And so when we tell our company failure is good, fail fast, that literally scares people. We don't want to fail. So I think we need a new word. Right. We want to avoid failure. Failure is catastrophic, and it should be avoided. But falling, I think we should encourage. You know, when a kid falls off a bicycle, we didn't tell them they failed. We tell them they fell, and what do we tell them? Get back up and try again. So I don't want to tell people they failed. I want to see people they fell, and I want to encourage them to try again and, you know, brush off their knees. So I think we should fall and fall often. And I will judge the quality of innovation not necessarily by if you fell, but how quickly you can pick yourself back up and try again.
What starts to happen is over the course of time, some of the process becomes calcified, and we follow it because we've just always followed it, and nobody really knows why it's there. And all it takes is one person to say, can somebody explain to me why we do it this way? And if nobody has an answer, then it's ripe to be changed or at least challenged. Yeah.
Why do we have 14 approvals for hiring one person?
Right. Why do we have 14 approvals to hire one person? Right, exactly. Can somebody give me a good reason why we do it this way? Well, we want to double check. We want to double check, meaning you don't trust the people who are making decisions? No, we trust them. Well then why do you have to double check them? And all of a sudden the argument falls apart.
So if I heard you correctly, the way we prevent this as a 95,000 person team is to have courage to speak up when something doesn't make sense.
The courage to speak up when something doesn't make sense. But also to allow people who question something to give them an open space to feel heard rather than defeated, you know, litigated. And if they have legitimate cause to change the process, but there's still fear to like blanketly change it, you know, everywhere, because that might be destructive to let them experiment their team with their group and try something new. And if it works, great, maybe we'll look at it. And if it doesn't work, then it's good. That's fine too. Thank you for testing it for us. It turns out that this process worked well enough. And so it's not just about speaking out. It's also about hearing it and allowing people to even challenge it sometimes if they have a better option. I don't like people who challenge things without a solution. This doesn't work great. What should we do? Well, it doesn't work. I got that. What should we do different? Got it. What should we do? And I like people to bring ideas.
That's exactly what this culture circles effort is all about, is giving people the power to address their subculture, to pilot ideas that they think will improve our culture.
I love that.
If they work, we're going to scale it, we're going to do it everywhere.
It's law of diffusion. It's the way you do things. You start with the early adopters, let them, because they don't mind the imperfections.
You know, some of it will come back automatically, like, you know, interacting with people. We thought it'd be so scary and difficult, but turns out it's okay. I think relearn is the importance of just sort of being around people. I think some of us got good at virtual and being separated. And I think we have to relearn the importance of, you know, having a meeting in person and having a brainstorming in person. The joy of the interaction and interrupting people. You can't interrupt people in flow over zoom, but you can in a meeting. And it's invigorating.
I think unlearn, maybe constant connection, being constantly connected. For some people, they reported working more, not less during COVID in a virtual scenario. Learning to turn things off. There was something magical about the commute you know, when you had to, like, go to work and come home from work, it's like, it gets you ready for the day, and it helps you unwind, unwind at the end of the day. And we lost the commute, and you start to sort of want it back a little bit. So I think relearn some of the stuff that we used to complain about. It maybe wasn't so bad after all.
