Not every big swing can be a home run, but if you don’t take them, you’ll never land one over the fences.
This swing-and-a-miss philosophy is critical for business innovation — it’s why “fail fast” is a common refrain in the tech industry. Audacious dreams, ambitious efforts and so-crazy-they-just-might-work ideas are what drive entrepreneurial companies forward.
But championing this kind of workplace culture is easier said than done: Leaders have to be willing to put valuable time and resources on the line, and success is never guaranteed.
Built In Boston connected with two companies that recognize these risks and are committed to innovation anyways. At The Predictive Index, Director of Strategy and Corporate Development Francois Bruneau said he makes a concerted effort to be transparent about his mistakes and challenges so his team feels comfortable doing the same and sees the work that goes into each win.
Magna International, meanwhile, rewards risk-taking through an annual employee challenge, and CEO Swamy Kotagiri said many of the business’s most impactful products and technologies were created through trial and error.
Missteps, after all, are opportunities to learn and grow. Or, as the renowned entrepreneur Henry Ford said, “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently."
Read on for more insights from Bruneau and Kotagiri about how experimentation empowers employees and benefits organizations.
Magna International is a mobility technology company and one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers.
How do you signal to your team members that it’s OK to take risks, experiment with their craft and be OK with potential failure in the process?
Creating an atmosphere with no constraints encourages experimentation. It’s how we keep our innovation flywheel spinning faster than the competition’s. Our long-standing entrepreneurial culture is the bedrock for empowering employees to develop and implement new ideas. This model creates a feeling of ownership among our employees and makes our shareholders confident in what we’ve done and where we’re going.
Creating an atmosphere with no constraints is how we keep our innovation flywheel spinning faster than the competition’s.”
An example of how we live by this principle is our annual Employee Innovation Challenge. We invite employees across Magna to form teams and propose solutions to that year’s challenge statement. And we don’t just ask for answers; we supply training along the way to help refine responses and hone presentation skills. The top teams present their proposals to our leadership for cash prizes and potential project funding.
Tell us about a time that your team took a risk with their work, and it did or did not work out. What was the outcome? How did the team benefit in the process?
Electric vehicle range anxiety is a major barrier to EV adoption. Potential EV buyers are concerned about the distance an EV can travel on a single charge — and they’re afraid of getting stranded during the journey. To address this concern, the Magna research and development team experimented with converting the motion of a vehicle’s shock absorbers into electrical energy to help recharge the battery. But the team quickly discovered that the energy captured was not enough to make a difference. So, they stopped the study. The team took a risk but did not consider the outcome a loss.
As they put it, “If we fail at the first step, we celebrate it. We have an answer in the shortest time possible.” It’s the “fail fast, fail cheap” approach.
For Magna, “failure” is not about testing an entire component or system until it breaks. It is about testing the most critical element. If we are researching new material, we don’t start by building a whole vehicle frame. We take a small sample of the material and put it under the most likely scenario that it would fail. If it passes that critical step, we move on to the next one.
For Magna, ‘failure’ is not about testing an entire component or system until it breaks. It is about testing the most critical element.”
How does encouraging your team to be experimental with their craft allow them to learn, grow and develop in the process?
Experimentation is key to unlocking new opportunities and staying ahead of the curve in an ever-changing industry. By allowing team members to try new approaches and solve problems in different ways, they can learn from their successes and failures, develop new skills and grow professionally and personally.
We have an employee who started as an intern and seized opportunities to learn and grow in an extremely technical space. A few years into her Magna career, she became a data scientist supporting Factory of the Future projects by creating machine learning and mathematical models that help everyone from frontline workers to the person driving a vehicle equipped with our innovative automotive systems.
An early pilot project she helped develop used data analysis and sensors to remotely identify, track and correct manufacturing issues at one of our facilities. The project was a success and is now being used to digitalize a whole factory, saving energy, water and money.
By giving our team members the freedom to explore and innovate, we can develop new products and technologies to better serve our customers and remain competitive.
The Predictive Index is a talent optimization platform that helps businesses, teams and leaders reach their full potential.
How do you signal to your team members that it's OK to take risks, experiment with their craft and be OK with potential failure in the process?
For a data team, failure usually means spending a lot of time and resources investigating a problem and either coming short of finding the root cause or recommending a wrong solution. That can feel really disengaging. So for me, it’s important to lead by example. I allocate a portion of my time to chasing questions that I find interesting. Then I document those questions as experiments on our public roadmap and share results during biweekly planning meetings. Four out of five times, this practice yields no results, but one out of five leads to a new insight that pushes the understanding of our business forward.
There’s a second piece to this, and it’s how you react as a leader when a risk doesn’t pay off or a mistake happens. One of our core values at PI states: “Errors of action are better than errors of inaction. Be brave.” This idea helps set the right mindset with team members. We reinforce the behavior during manager’s meetings by sharing wins and failures and celebrating when people are open with their struggles.
One of our core values at PI states: ‘Errors of action are better than errors of inaction. Be brave.’”
Tell us about a time that you took a risk with your work and it did or did not work out. What was the outcome? How did the team benefit in the process?
One of my first projects at The Predictive Index involved predicting the performance of one of our revenue channels using a statistical model. It was something that we had never done before as a company, so investing resources in that was a significant effort. After spending months cleaning the raw data and building a dynamic regression model with another analyst on my team, our initial conclusion was that none of the variables we looked at were meaningful. It was a pretty disappointing update to give the leadership team. Eventually, we found a couple of actions that were highly correlated with success. Unfortunately, this did not yield the expected results, because it turned out the action wasn’t causal. Not only did we not improve performance, but we also lost a key signal by crowding it with false positives.
Overall, our risk of trying a new modeling technique did not work out for this project. However, we did improve a lot in the process: Our analysts developed new skills, we fostered stronger relationships with our product science team, we created better data-collection processes and we gained better insights into which levers in our business may be causal.
How does encouraging your team to be experimental with their craft allow them to learn, grow and develop in the process?
At The Predictive Index, we encourage everyone to have a big, hairy, audacious goal.Often, someone’s BHAG involves work outside of their current department and requires flexing their skill set by taking on new challenges. This cross-functional work helps our employees build strong relationships with new stakeholders and turn them into advocates.
This happened last year for one of our analysts during the budgeting process for our revenue team. During a quarterly development conversation, he expressed interest in participating more actively in that process. He took a forecasting class as part of his continued development, which created the perfect opportunity to transition this project to him. He built multiple scenarios looking at marketing spend and inside sales resources. The final product involved leading a presentation in partnership with our revenue team to get approval from our CFO. This project strengthened his forecasting skills, his relationship with other teams and his presentation skills. When budgeting season comes around this year, he’ll be ready for an even bigger role.
