Failure can give us a powerful prod to success

By MICHAEL SMYTHE*

"Failure is our most important product." This maxim underpins the culture at Johnson & Johnson. World-leading, innovative learning organisations committed to continuous improvement have a creative relationship with failure - it is not defined as bad and perpetrators are not punished.

Mistakes are essential points on the learning curve created by the knowledge wave.

Monday night's TV documentary about Sir Peter Blake catalogued the hard-won knowledge gained on the waves of the Southern Ocean as he repeatedly failed to win round-the-world races.

Sir Peter's willingness to learn led directly to building the team that won and then defended the America's Cup. Today's Team New Zealand is young, inexperienced and the beneficiary lately of an in-depth, accelerated learning event.

Now that it is no longer at the top, should we do what the Australians did and say: "We didn't like that game anyway" and give up? Or should we demonstrate world-class behaviour, and the best human qualities, by bouncing back?

We should plant ourselves firmly in the fertile compost of failure and grow like hell.

Since 1995 Team New Zealand has been held up as an exemplar of a smart, technologically innovative, world-class ability to punch above our weight.

As Helen Clark has said, this is about much more than a boat race. It is about building the New Zealand brand beyond the clean, green land of sheep.

For the Team New Zealand model to continue to deliver a return on our investment we must learn from each stage of the process.

Intention: The BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) that inspired the early challenges was the outrageous idea that little New Zealand could beat the Americans at their own game. We now need an even more empowering purpose.

Resourcing: It may be that the deeper pockets of Ernesto Bertarelli dealt a fatal blow at the outset by presenting an offer that key human resources could not refuse, and then funding a more rigorous research and development programme.

Team building: Team New Zealand set the standard in 1995 and 2000. We can speculate that the culture changed within the new team and/or that the team culture was developed to an even higher standard in the Alinghi camp.

Design process: Conjecture that the boats this year went back to the old designer-driven model is strongly denied by Team New Zealand. The sailing team accept full responsibility for the boat they chose.

The difference may have been in the depth of intuitive understanding of what would work best (a strength that Sir Peter gained through years of hands-on trial and error) and Russell Coutts' ability to engage knowledgeably and creatively with the design team because of his engineering background. Team New Zealand's creative big idea did not deliver a breakthrough in performance.

Production: The public may never be privy to the analysis of the roles that design and making had in the gear failures. It is a strength of our yachting that we have world-class boat builders. The potential to team up on the design and building of winning boats here must be realised again.

Testing: It has been suggested that the inability to risk rigorous testing may have been the downfall of the campaign. Design modifications and manufacturing improvements continue in the field of battle, but the fundamentals must be right when production begins.

Performance in practice: America's Cup yachting is a zero-sum game. There is a clearly definable bottom line - either we win or we lose.

Formway Furniture (the answer to the "who designed the breakthrough 'Life' chair?" question posed on the backdrop of the Knowledge Wave conference) has been inspired by the Team New Zealand model. It could now return the favour by sharing what it has learned from its Life chair project.

Formways' BHAG was to exceed the international benchmark in workplace seating. The best way to make that viable was to join with a world-leading office-furniture company that could penetrate large markets quickly. They chose United States-based Knoll International.

Formways' ability to form smart, innovative cross-disciplinary teams in-house has now extended to working with RMIT in Melbourne (to make the chair a leader in eco-responsibility) and Knoll (to design for higher production volumes).

The development of a detailed, agreed design brief is a feature of the Formway process. Although the project team works with a product its members experience as end-users, it engages continuously in external reviews with stakeholders and rigorously tests prototypes in all possible conditions.

The Life chair's creative breakthrough was the delivery of intuitive ergonomics through tension mechanisms that respond to user movement without conscious control. The creative team culture also led to tooling innovations.

So far the Life chair's success can be measured in international accolades, including Gold awards in the US and Canada, product of the year awards in Britain and great reviews comparing it with chairs that sat on the previous benchmark. But its bottom line will be bums on seats (sales figures are not yet available).

The Formway breakthrough to global leadership, when it happens, will be the result of a 20-year commitment to design-led growth as a learning organisation.

We can learn much from our successes. But we may learn even more from our failures if we are willing to embrace them as our most important product.

* Michael Smythe is a partner in a design management and cultural strategy consultancy.

Further reading: nzherald.co.nz/americascup