Failure can be used to one’s advantage to drive change.

Management guru Sumantra Ghoshal once said “Nothing fails like success and nothing fails as spectacularly as spectacular success.”

It is said that every success has failure built into it. The reason for this is the complacence that sets in and the attitude of attributing success to one’s brilliance and then concluding that since one is brilliant one cannot fail.

When the going is good (when the rewards far exceed expectations) there is very little incentive to change, and any change initiative proposed by top management or otherwise lands into indifferent ears. Even if accepted grudgingly, change is likely to fail since there is no wholehearted involvement.

Often it is seen that people are reluctant to embrace better ways of doing things till there is a crisis, when there is no option but to desperately seek out a better way or close shop altogether. The question then is how can one embrace change proactively much before it is too late? Instead of changing dramatically in a make or break fashion. Though even this is sometimes desirable. Perhaps every setback or adversity is an occasion to galvanise change, commitment and energy.

One way could be to focus on minor setbacks, amplify these to create alarm bells and use this for driving change. For instance, imagine a situation where you have talented sales people very content with their individual performance. Not willing to focus on collaboration, or coordination of the sales team. Not willing to look beyond their own cosy boundaries. Pleas of “you can do more,” possibly might fall on deaf ears, since “things are fine are they not?” And the team is just not embracing the need to look at more possibilities, which might come from learning from each other, planning better, looking for opportunities beyond what is currently possible. Now how does one make change take place?

The first step in my view is to create a context for change:- One way to do this is by presenting facts, cases etc. and giving a “bhashan” on the need to collaborate etc. The team might nod their heads, even smile their approvals but after the chat, business goes on as usual. The only way the context can actually be created is if the team feels and relates to the need for change. The driving factor for this could be anything. It could be that a key customer account got lost. Or the performance for the month was a lot below par, what ever. A crisis is the best time to put things in context. “We can not go on as we have in the past” is broadly the message that needs to emerge from the team. In my view the best way is to use a crisis to amplify the need to change. Once the need is created the team has adequate intelligence to figure out what the change needs to be. The logic being if the team figures out on its own what the new way is, it is more likely to embrace it rather than if it is pushed by someone.

I guess creating the context to spur change is an art by it self. Use of stimuli and using the right questions is the key. The idea is not to manipulate the team to a preconceived solution but to honestly believe that the team will find a better way of doing things once the need to change is forcefully conveyed.

A common reaction to failure is to find a scapegoat. The scapegoat typically is a person. I would rather find a scapegoat not in a person, but in something more fundamental, the logic of the business, the way a process is carried out, the way things are managed, or attitudes and habits of people in the team. It is much better to focus on the ailment rather than the symptoms. The idea is to use every failure as an opportunity for changing these fundamentals.

The immediate question which arises next is what if the sailing is good, and there are no apparent failures. I heard Mr. Chandran of Essae Chandran Institute in Bangalore once narrate a concept on what the Japanese do when practicing Kaizen. Imagine a ship sailing smoothly, in high seas, the mood is complacent, now if the water line were to get lowered the ship is likely to encounter dangerous rocks, the team in the ship is likely to get out of their stupor and focus on how to navigate the ship past these rocks. The idea that Mr.Chandran shared was to consciously lower the water line so that people are more alert to potential problems and issues. The idea might be similar to the concept of raising the bar, but the need is to do this through a process, where the team gets exposed continually to market realities, challenges and learns the ability to face hard and difficult facts, and on doing so a better way emerges.

The author is the Chief Catalyst of businessgyan, his areas of interest are business strategy and innovation. For feed back and more information send mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )\n This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )"

Issue BG26 May03

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