The HR community should be celebrating this week to mark The National Portrait Gallery’s decision to exhibit all its best fake works of art. Why is this significant? It demonstrates an attitude that it’s okay – even interesting – to make mistakes.
The curator who purchased some of these fake works of art was dismissed in shame. He made mistakes. Heaven knows how many brilliant pieces of art he acquired during his curatorship – but his mistakes cost him his job.
As we pull ourselves out from the recession, managers regularly refer to the need to innovate. They talk about this as if it is something that only happens because one day you decide, “Right, today I’m going to be innovative.” But they fail to recognise the huge need for an organisation to be innovation-ready in terms of its leaders’ attitudes, people policies and storytelling. Unless management and the wider organisation accepts that mistakes happen and that innovation can be born from mistakes, nobody is going to take the required risks to innovate.
Look at the tale of Dr Spencer Silver, the scientist at 3M who accidentally created the low-tack adhesive. His mistake occurred back in 1968 and he spent the next 15 years trying to get someone in the company to see the value in his creation. In 1977 3M launched the product and experienced a resounding failure because nobody had trialled or understood the product. Finally, in 1980 (after a period of free trials), the company launched Post-it notes.
Just think – if the organisation had understood the innovation process better and knew how to harness the value of those unscheduled “mistakes” – it could have stolen a march of 12 years on the market. Imagine the value that the company missed out on because it did not really understand how to bring innovation to market.
Maybe we need a UK-wide “National best mistakes week” to raise awareness within leadership groups of the enormous potential value of the mistakes in their business. And to get them to think about how to handle the people who make them. The mistakes of this year could well be the key income sources of years to come. Makes you think, doesn’t it?