Page 76 - The Resilient Organization

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A very important part of performance management is to avoid the trauma
that high-risk or high-passion endeavors, such as innovation, are prone to.
Here is a story that encompasses trauma from innovation (linked to thin-
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computing client called the Sun Ray at Sun Microsystems, once a very
promising computing innovation) and some thoughts toward how such
debilitative side effects can be avoided. Innovation is an important aspect of
performance—often acclaimed as the source of competitive advantage—yet
it has a dark side rarely talked about. This dark side is critical to acknowl-
edge in any performance management discussion since only a very few
succeed as initially hoped and most actually fail. This failure tends to be
highly emotional and carry huge organizational consequences, and it is
potentially a major enemy of resilience if left unattended.
This discussion is based on an article I coauthored with Martin Hoegl
and Michael Gibbert titled, “Why Learning from Failure Isn’t Easy (and
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What to Do about It): Innovation Trauma at Sun Microsystems.” The orig-
inal case study was written with Jay Moldenhauer-Salazar who at the time
was the director of Sun’s Human Resources Labs.

CAUSES OF INNOVATION TRAUMA

Common wisdom suggests that “you learn more from your failures than
your successes.” However, I find this is not always true for failed innova-
tions in organizations. In fact, there are instances when one failed innova-
tion in an otherwise successful organization “traumatizes” the team and
weakens its spirit permanently. The ill effects of such trauma include not
only missed lessons from the failure but also the possibility of causing a new
failure (precisely because of missed learnings from the earlier failure).

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