Don’t Sweep It Under the Rug

Lego Figurine of Lego's CEO: Niels B. Christiansen

Working this week with one of the great tech companies, we reviewed a pivotal

approach to addressing failure. As we explored how to build and sustain an innovation

culture, we kept talking about the dangers of sweeping failures under the rug. Most

companies do it, and as a result, most companies fail to learn the truly valuable lessons

that could accelerate their success.

Consider the contrast trajectories of Playmobile and Lego. During the 1970s and 1980s

Lego and Playmobile were of roughly comparable size. Although Lego was always

slightly larger, today Lego dwarfs the size and popularity of Playmobile. One reason is

Lego’s attitude towards failure.

In conversation with Lego’s CEO, we discussed an early failure that accelerated their

trajectory to the incredible Lego success of today. Lego had launched a product with a

digital add-on, one of their first forays into the digital world. The product crashed and

burned. Rather than blame the team who launched it or whisper in the hallway about the

disaster, they sat down and did a careful, open, and positive post-mortem of what they

learned from the experience.

What rose to the surface proved truly transformative for Lego. The team realized that

they lived in a product-based world where, if everyone does their job well, they make

and ship products once. After it leaves the warehouse, they never see it or hear about it

again.

By contrast, in a digital world cycles are continuous. If you ship a digital product, it

needs to be updated, improved, and evolved. Although this may seem obvious to digital

native companies it proved vital to Lego’s future success as they move into a digital

future.

More importantly, the process itself of purposefully trying to learn as much as possible at

every juncture is the real secret to their success and the reason why today Lego is such

breakout story. Although we are inclined to sweep a failure under the rug, redeeming

the failure by focusing on what we learn could not only improve our current effort, but

may provide the clue to breakout success we have been missing!