How global guru of failure succeeds

By Selwyn Parker

It's difficult not to be impressed by a speech from somebody who, as my old science teacher used to say, "has more degrees than a thermometer".

But when this same speaker insists that the secret of commercial success lies in the study of failure, you really do tend to sit up and take notice.

Certainly, that's what a lot of people did when Dr Kent Stephens - former expert in ballistic missiles, PhD in quantitative methods as well as in optimisation mathematics in organisational behaviour and administration, MEd in mathematics and education psychology, a BSc in the triple majors of mathematics, chemistry and geology - launched controversially into the inaugural address at the Beca/University of Auckland Engineering in Society function.

You almost heard a sharp intake of breath from around the Sheraton's function room when the bespectacled Dr Stephens, a smiling, moon-faced man, asked the rhetorical question: "What could be more positive than avoiding failure?"

Just as riveting was Dr Stephens' admission that, in his ballistic missile days, the probability analysis used by the US Air Force to convince itself that a missile wouldn't launch itself accidentally was in fact so flawed that, in theory, a rogue warhead could have just about been on its way at any one time.

It took Dr Stephens and his number-crunching colleagues to convince the USAF that it should really be more careful.

Speaking under the rather impenetrable title of "Hidden benefits associated with uncommon risk management," Dr Stephens, who advises Fortune 500 companies, poured cold water on the success strategies of most companies as intellectually specious.

"The whole world is trying to elevate the possibility of success," he observed derisively.

This was futile. Far better to focus on failure by "managing situations in terms of what should not be."

He calls his approach "failure-depressant risk analysis" and has, as you would expect with somebody who has more degrees than a thermometer, lots of statistics to prove his point.

Dr Stephens has analysed this subject to death and seems perfectly content to be a global guru of failure.

In this, he's a latter-day philosopher. There's an Arabic proverb that says: "Man learns little from success, but much from failure."

As the guru of failure describes it, the problems with success strategies are many-fold but just one of them is that they bear a "huge consensus problem" in the sense that it's very difficult for a group of people to agree on exactly how success should be achieved.

On the other hand, "there's plenty of agreement about what constitutes failure." Most people quickly identify what are the forces that can derail a project.

A second problem with success strategies is the weight of forces that conspire against them.

"The net effect of these emergent resisting forces [poor management decisions, technological barriers, personality conflicts, organisational problems, etc] is to attenuate or slow down the effectiveness of the success driving forces." In other words, the blind pursuit of success is akin to shoving a stone uphill (see accompanying story).

Obvious conclusion: "Why not weaken the resisting forces before they reach their full fury?" suggests Dr Stephens.

When companies start to concentrate on the causes of failure, surprising results emerge. For example, although you might think the opposite, managers who tell staff what they absolutely must not do as distinct from what they should do generally find that they have unleashed a torrent of creativity, argues Dr Stephens.

With the few "nots" quickly understood and out of the way, staff quickly realise how much freedom they really have.

There's money and glory in this. In Dr Stephens' experience, executives who operate failure-depressant strategies, whether by design or intuitively, are promoted the most rapidly.

"In its simplest form these executives are adept at viewing their situations in terms of determining [and] then avoiding things that can go wrong rather than instituting new pursuits to success," insists this cheerful iconoclast.

Therefore, executives who want to get promoted quickly should realise there are three phases in failure-depressant risk management that can take from seven to 42 weeks to implement. Without getting into too much detail, phase one is risk identification, phase two is risk prioritisation and phase three is risk removal or mitigation.

And you'd better get cracking. Reading between Dr Stephens' lines, it's the champions of failure who make the most successful executives.

Footnote: Perhaps the wittiest comment on the blind pursuit of success comes from W.C. Fields, who said: "If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it."