I’ve taught the tutorial How to innovate on time a few times now, and the big takeaway for most is the need to carve out time for failure. That’s right, failure.

Plenty of notable innovation quotes talk about the need to fail, for example:

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate. – Thomas J. Watson

Failure is the gateway to innovation – Ashley Ball

Whoever makes the most mistakes wins – Ralph Keyes

But few know how to convert that into action. How do you guide failure towards innovation?

The answer is 3 things:

1. Make interesting failures. An interesting failure is when you learn something through failure you could not have learned any other way. Scientific experiments are attempts to fail in interesting ways: the thing doesn’t work, but why it doesn’t work reveals a new set of interesting questions. This is different from a mistake: a useless, avoidable failure than isn’t interesting and doesn’t teach you anything you didn’t already know.
2. Budget time for experimentation. If you want new ideas, you have to give people time to find them. Google’s 20% time, an upgrade of 3M’s 10% rule, builds in experimentation at the individual level. But nothing prevents a manager from doing the same thing at the project level. Instead of the generic Design, Implement, Test style scheduling, shown here:

   

   Divide time into quarters instead and reserve part of the schedule for experimentation, prototyping and interesting mistake making.

   

   Even if you don’t budget 25% of the project time, you can still offer a week, a day, a half-day, for individuals to experiment and try things out without requiring anyone’s approval. Even small windows of time are better than none (Also see hack day, for putting experimentation at the corporate level). Once the design phase starts the risk taking declines, but all decisions now benefit from the interesting failures during experimentation.

3. Pick specific areas for innovation. If you have a schedule commitment, you can’t risk big changes across a project. Instead leaders have to decide on specific areas where more risks (e.g. more innovation) is warranted, and ensure that the rest of the project will be managed conservatively. Just like how a smart general doesn’t fight wars on several fronts, a wise leader doesn’t innovate on several different areas at the same time, especially when under schedule pressure.

Slides from How to Innovate on Time tutorial (4MB PPT).