Page 87 - The Resilient Organization

74 Part Two: Step 1. Managing the Consequences of Past Performance

make sense of the experience in retrospect, from a distance.) Was my per-
formance at fault? To what extent is someone or something else (for exam-
ple, the management or the timing of the product launch) to blame? Was it
all JavaStation’s fault?
Third, collaborative case writing can be used by team members to avoid
trauma by maximizing learning from failure. In this method, companies
systematically write their own cases, that is, cooperatively document the
knowledge and experience they themselves have acquired (for example,
Probst, 2002). Traditionally, case studies are mostly used for teaching pur-
poses in management training (Locke & Brazelton, 1997; Thomas, 1998).
Through conveying intricate problems and experience, they are uniquely
suited for portraying the tacit knowledge and experience acquired over
time. Not only do tacit best practices and common experiences become
explicit, but new light is also shed on past failures, disclosing important les-
sons learned. Moreover, this learning can be situated in the larger context
of a company’s technology and innovation strategy, where a project failure
marks a setback rather than a definitive and ultimate blow to long-term
success. An internal Sun Ray case has been used in Sun Microsystems’
Leadership Institute, in part, for this purpose.
Fourth, innovation trauma can be alleviated by carefully managing the
excitement for a new project. For example, avoid overloading the project
with unrealistic expectations. The company expected to sell 100,000 Sun
Ray machines the first year. The much lower actual sales were an early (and
perhaps unnecessary) signal of failure. The hype shifts expectations and
invites trauma by creating conditions that are overwhelming; in that case,
people often feel unable to exercise any control (for example, Stuart, 1996).
For example, the extent to which such a discrepancy between expectations
and outcomes is perceived as threatening to one’s career in the company
(Hogan, 1987) may determine the degree of the trauma experience. 5
Fifth, the perception of losing control over the development of the highly
vested project in a critical moment can be traumatizing (Greenberger &
Strasser, 1986). The JavaStation merger was an event that led to the founder
team losing control over the project at a very critical point in development:
just before the expected product launch. Also, the roller coaster of chang-
ing executive sponsors contributed to the team’s feeling of not being in
control of the Sun Ray’s destiny while adding to the burden of trying to