“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again!”

This saying gets at the heart of the idea that sometimes it is necessary to fail once, twice or even many times before achieving success. But while it may impart the exact message that a tenth-grader needs to hear when tackling quadratic equations, abiding by this maxim could cause a manager or CEO to lose his or her job. Especially now, when jobs are insecure to begin with, and CEOs are replaced for small or even potential mistakes, error elimination systems seem to be the name of the game and playing it safe seems like the only way to get by. But a Business Week report by Jena McGregor reminds us that sometimes, “Failure Breeds Success,” and for those who learn this lesson, the payoff can be huge.

McGregor looks to the Coca Cola Company, an American icon of unending success, for ideas on dealing with failure. Remember “New Coke?” It was such a disaster that “Coca Cola Classic” was needed just to reassure suspicious buyers they were getting the taste they wanted. And Surge didn’t fare much better; sales plummeted when people realized it was just like Mountain Dew. Nonetheless, Chairman and CEO E. Neville Isdell told investors, "You will see some failures. As we take more risks, this is something we must accept as part of the regeneration process." In the modern business environment, this was a dangerous thing to tell investors, but they took the risk, and I don’t think they’ve been disappointed.

Intellectually, we know that trial and error and learning go hand in hand, but the emphasis placed on performance in corporate culture runs counter to risk. And Paul Schoemaker, CEO of Decision Strategies International Inc. notes how difficult it is to find an executive who can balance “performance culture” and “learning culture.”      

That is where project managers come in; it is precisely our job to guide teams to success when they are doing something new – something that requires learning. This space between risk and success is a source of many challenges as well. We face a ton of pressure to get it right the first time. After all, our clients hire us to make their projects successful. It is all too easy to transfer this pressure to the team, which results in an extremely risk-averse project environment, where no one is brave enough to offer up a new idea. But since projects are inherently the undertaking of something new, something that has never been done before, it follows that new ideas will be fundamental to success.

Therefore, our first task is not to provide success metrics and a way to achieve them, but to generate a working environment in which creativity, and the failures it sometimes sets up, is supported and encouraged. This requires the courage to go against a corporate culture that puts the bottom line first. But moving forward requires openness to change, and as leaders of change initiative, we are best positioned to demonstrate just how important this openness is. It will take a lot of time, energy and dedication to teach the value of failure and learning from mistakes, and reduce the risk creativity holds for most project workers.

In the meantime, when the pressure to succeed just gets to be too much, crack open a Coke and think about what it took to get there. 

Jena McGregor’s original article can be found at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_28/b3992001.htm?chan=innovation_innovation+%2B+design_top+stories