Better to take risks than to repeat errors

We need a new approach to our seemingly intractable problems

VARIOUS companies underperformed last year, and others barely met their targets. Most would attribute their poor performances to the low-growth environment. Few would attribute them to the failure of the initiatives they implemented during the year.

The reality is that we are going into another year with a low-growth outlook on the economy, currently estimated at 1%. As such, we can prepare for the same outcome as the end of last year or we can start looking into the initiatives that were implemented and why they failed.

We need to try a different approach to finding solutions this year. It starts with accepting that we need to change how we think. As one of the greatest minds in modern history, Albert Einstein, once said: “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”

The need for changing how we think is not applicable to business alone. Look at our most recent national matric results as an example. In a country that needs a significant step change in academic performance to align us with the rest of the world, we are still achieving only a slight improvement in results.

This is not because there were insufficient resources and effort, but because we are using the same thought processes to solve the problem as we have used in the past.

It is disheartening that the pupils who recently commenced the academic year have to accept that their performance at the end of 2017 is unlikely to be much better than last year’s.

The same is true of the 5% increase in the number of road accidents over the festive season — despite the fact that more controls were put in place to prevent this.

It is high time we improved our chances of resolving these longstanding challenges by using a completely different approach.

We need to stop defaulting to the solutions we already know, merely adjusting them slightly each year and hoping for a significant change in the results. We need to be more open to new ways of doing things. Let’s forget the same textbook answers we normally default to during such times, such as cutting costs, retrenching staff and becoming dependent on the same sales and marketing techniques that worked in the past.

This may mean being comfortable with taking on more risk. As much as risk-taking is not the preferred mentality in tough times, it is better than taking the same actions and expecting different results.

This unconventional way of doing things will lead to a higher rate of failure than before — that is what happens when you take risks. But there is nothing wrong with failure as long as you learn from it.

Let’s take a lesson from Google: its key enabler for success is being able to reward people for the failures they encounter when taking on risk.

Google is more interested in what teams have learnt from their failures, not whether the proposed initiative delivered the desired outcome. It has created a culture of celebrating these failures.

When we fail, we learn. But often we make the mistake of overpenalising failure as an outcome instead of unpacking what was learnt during the process of failure.

A big lesson learnt from a small failure today can have a big impact on the decisions we make in the future.

Taking a leap to try something different almost always attracts resistance from others, especially from the more traditional managers who are still responsible for most of the key decisions in organisations. Hopefully, most of us will realise that it is a fight worth having. Otherwise, we will end yet another year of missing targets and again blaming it on a low-growth environment.

The optimist in me remains hopeful that if enough companies apply this different way of thinking during the same year, we might just be able to turn around the national growth figures. That is something worth fighting for.

If there is one thing to aim for this year, let’s aim to fail at something. That way, we know we will learn something in the process, instead of using the same thinking and being disappointed when we do not get a different outcome.

Sikhakhane is an international speaker and an executive at Circle Food Group, with a business honours degree from the University of Cape Town and an MBA from Stanford University