Fear of failure is something many of us struggle with individually, but within an organization it can be magnified in a way that leaves everyone paralyzed as they attempt to go about their day-to-day work. Not only a terribly inefficient way to do business, this state of fear stifles creativity and innovation, creating a very unhealthy setting for growth. Being conservative is one thing, but when a fear of falling short leads to the refusal of members to push the envelope, organizations are destined for stagnation and eventual failure.

This conversation came up in my squadron at a recent training day. The issue involved pilots and loadmasters trying to accomplish the mission with the constant fear of a Q3 (Air Force speak for a documented failure or breech of standards doled out by squadron leadership) hanging over each of their heads if they messed up. A Q3 isn’t necessarily a career-ender, but it stays in your permanent record and can have negative consequences for future assignments or promotions.

Many pilots and loadmasters voiced a similar complaint that went something like this, “Q3’s are handed out like candy in our organization even for small mistakes, no other community gives out Q3’s as much as ours. Basically, we know that if we mess up in anyway, we’re going to get hammered, no matter what.”

The squadron leadership countered that they held us to a higher standard than other organizations and accepted less margin of error. Additionally, they were concerned that by easing up or taking Q3’s off the table that we would take advantage and become lazy or disregard procedures.

The debate went on for over an hour and centered around one question:

How does an organization cultivate healthy risk-taking without losing control?

Obviously organizations can’t take the Q3 (fill in your own organization’s hammer equivalent) away completely, as there are times when people do something very stupid or dangerous and must be held accountable. There must be a negative incentive for recklessness and negligence or it will slowly become acceptable to take unreasonable levels of risk.

On the other hand, when Q3’s are the go-to punishment for even the most minor mistakes it causes every pilot and loadmaster to second-guess every move they make, call home for every decision and seek cover from leadership before ever even thinking about stepping out on the limb. It’s like swatting a fly with a hammer. Hammers aren’t very precise and should only be used as a last resort, not the go-to instrument of punishment when things go wrong.

Innovation requires risk and inherent in risk is the occasional mistake. In an environment where every mistake is severely punished, the career field stagnates, no new techniques or methods are developed and leaders turn into cowards rather than heroes.

This isn’t the first time an organization has wrestled with this type of dilemma. Every day leaders must make decisions on how to react to missteps and poor decisions made by their employees. Come off too weak and the fear is that people will walk all over you. Be too harsh and people will either begrudgingly toe the line or simply walk away - neither helpful to the organization.

The military presents two additional dilemmas:

- You don’t have the option of quitting (unless you’ve fulfilled your obligation) so the default mode when faced with an environment of heavy-handed punishments is to be ultra-conservative and never go beyond the minimum required for fear of failure. The attitude becomes one of survival rather than professionalism.

- Unlike some organizations where the cost of failure can be measured in dollars, ours has the potential to be measured in lives. Every time we turn on the jet we hold people’s lives in our hands, not to mention a $200 million piece of equipment. Risk must be taken, but at some point it becomes criminal.

Needless to say, these characteristics present a very fine line for military leadership. How does one encourage troops to push the boundaries of their career field, develop new techniques, improve processes and take risk, but at the same time keep people from getting killed?

A very similar predicament can be found in the medical profession. As a surgeon, how does one develop their skills or new techniques when the consequences for making a mistake often mean a dead body on the table? Cadavers are great, but can only tell you so much. Sooner or later a life has to be put on the line to advance the medical profession. How does a Chief of Surgery manage his people in a way that encourages this advancement, but avoids taking on an unacceptable amount of risk?

After discussing these things and doing some thinking of my own, here are a few solutions I have come up with. The following are a few ways that organizations involved in life and death missions can encourage innovation and risk-taking without being negligent:

1) Accept the Little Mistakes - If you are going to create a system of risk-taking and innovation, you have to accept that mistakes will be made. In his book “Product Innovation Strategy Pure and Simple,” Michel Robert explains that not all mistakes are equal, nor should they be treated as such.

When I worked at Johnson & Johnson in the early 1960’s, a motto permeated the organization: ‘If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not making decisions.’…that is how J&J encourages risk taking. 3M does it in a similar fashion. ‘Make a lot of little mistakes, but try to avoid big ones,’ is 3M’s way of doing the same thing…Innovative thinking requires risk taking. Prudent and calculated risk taking, but nevertheless, risk taking.

2) Practice Harder, Much Harder Than You Play - In our profession we have multi-million dollar simulators whose sole purpose is to replicate our actual flight experience as close as possible. On top of this we have local training missions in the actual jet, but minus passengers or valuable cargo. These are the best places to push the envelope, make mistakes and try new techniques. Unfortunately they are often treated like another box to fill, rather than an opportunity to push the limits.

While organizations may not have actual simulators most have some sort of training mechanism available to hone the skills of its members. Any leader seeking to create an innovative environment must establish the precedent that training time means pushing oneself beyond one’s limits.

Training is the time for experimentation, mistakes and failure…not just another routine mission.

3) Celebrate the Risk-Takers - One of the quickest ways to decipher the values of a company is to observe the people they celebrate. If the qualifications of people receiving quarterly and yearly awards are measured only by the absence of mess-ups, it sends a strong message that sticking one’s neck out on the line and trying something new is not valued or encouraged. Better to toe the line and hope you’ll be recognized someday for showing up to work on time in the right uniform.

Instead, an organization trying to encourage risk taking should be quick to recognize and celebrate those who are doing just that, taking risks! Who cares if they’ve failed a few times along the way. Mistakes made in the attempt of pushing boundaries and testing new ideas (very different than mistakes made by incompetence or negligence) are prime indicators that innovation is occurring, or as J&J was quoted above, “…decisions are being made.”

Hold these people up as an example to the rest of the organization and people will soon realize that risk is something to embrace rather than shun.

4) Trust Your Employees - It is imperative that organizational leadership trust their personnel. If you don’t trust the people working for you, replace them with people you do. This does not mean that it is blind. Like anything in life, trust is something that is earned over time, but some leaders never make it to that point, always choosing to assume the worst, rather than the best. This is a problem.

Part of this trust involves a belief that everyone is working for the betterment of the organization as a whole. As a leader it’s your job to give those working for you the benefit of the doubt when mistakes are made. If the same mistakes happen repeatedly, then address them as such, but the standard posture must always be trust.

At the end of the day every organization must understand that the behavior of each of their members is a direct result of the system they have in place (hat tip to USAFA’s Mgt 303). Leaders can chant risk-taking mantras all day to their employees, but if they punish the first member that falls short in his or her endeavors members will read their call for change for what it really is, lip-service.

In order to cultivate an innovative environment, leaders may have to initially bite their tongue at mistakes they may have punished in the past, whether they like it or not. Until members feel confident that the default mode in their organization is for leaders to back up their employees rather than punish them nothing will change and risk-takers will be replaced by 9-5 sheep.