A couple of weeks back, I gave my presentation on The 5 Traits of the Quantum IT Organization at a management meeting of a very large IT organization. Later that night, I was talking in the bar with a couple of the participants who I have also been working with for some time.
We were chatting around a bunch of related things and it led to me telling a story that I had read once about Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today. He found that having reached a level of success, he had a unique opportunity to meet a large number of very famous, very successful people and he decided to try to find out what it was that they all had in common – to discover the “secret to success.” He realized that they had nothing in common, except for one thing – they had all suffered a complete and dismal failure at some point in their lives. And they had picked themselves up and started over again.
As I was recounting this story, one of the people I was chatting with turned and uttered one of the more profound things that I have heard in a while. He said,
“Sometimes the biggest failure is not failing enough.”
I was a bit stunned. It was a true moment of clarity for me. The biggest failure is simply not being willing to fail.
We have created an environment in our corporate organizations that discourages risk-taking and penalizes failure. When something goes wrong, the first reaction is to always figure out who is to blame. We all need to be accountable for our willful disregard of process and protocol. But we also need to create a culture in which our teams are unafraid to take a measured risk to achieve something great.
But this is real risk that I am talking about here. Not risk that is simply “mitigated” so that we can guarantee success. This is the kind of risk that means we might actually fail. It is the only path to true transformation.
The Roadblock to The Quantum Age
It is this unwillingness to take risk, this unwillingness to accept the possibility of failure, that will stop organizations from moving into The Quantum Age. Executing this transformation is uncharted territory. There is a neat little project plan to follow. Becoming a Quantum IT organization will require that you try new things, knowing that many of them simply will not work, until you find that breakthrough that takes you to next level.
As IT leaders, we need to become comfortable with the idea of “failure.” We must learn to take calculated risks. We must acknowledge that many of these will not work – and we must “fail fast,” learn from our mistakes and keep moving. It is the only way that we will truly transform our organizations and take them into The Quantum Age.
For those organizations who don’t make it, it will not be because they failed. It will be because they did not fail enough.
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