Can Failure Be and Feel Productive?

There’s a saying that’s usually applied to writing: “Kill your darlings.” It’s a nudge to let go of a much-chewed-over clever phrase that doesn’t help the overall story.

We use the saying at IDEO, too. But our “darlings” are hypotheses or “sacrificial concepts” that we quickly put to the test and are willing to abandon. Iteration is the lifeblood of the design process—and the magic of it is that it allows for what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson calls “productive failure.”

When companies face business challenges that require innovation, the instinct is to look for and land on a solution and sell it internally in order to secure permission to move forward. But what if the path you’ve chosen doesn’t pan out? We have a natural instinct to persist: The company has allocated money and resources, and it’s easier to hang onto the hope that a turnaround is just around the bend than to pivot. 

But hope won’t improve your business performance, and in an era of new pressures like disruptive AI and climate change, companies must stretch further, increase their comfort learning from failure, and continually find ways to meet the changing expectations of employees and customers. 

To move at pace, we have to reframe business challenges as human challenges: What is desirable from a human point of view? What do people really need? In a recent piece of work with H&M, we asked: How can we help the fashion retailer meet their customers’ desire to use less plastic and also the organization’s goal to meet climate commitments? Insights drawn from in-depth interviews with and observation of customers and other stakeholders combined with data already collected by the organization helped us generate hypotheses that we could quickly test. 

Switching the packaging for online orders from plastic to paper may sound like a simple swap. But the H&M group owns eight brands, all with different merchandise and labeling and there were many hurdles to clear. It ended up taking more than 12 months and repeated small pilots to ensure the more sustainable packaging would work. 

Finding out that something doesn’t work—and, crucially, why—sets you up to more deeply understand the constraints you're operating within. And reframing an abandoned concept as a learning rather than a failure allows you to prioritize continuous improvement, keep teams motivated, and build stakeholder confidence.

Organizations may feel like they don’t have the luxury of time to test new ideas. As long as you're clear on the learning goals and how you'll assess progress you can test concepts in one to two weeks at low-cost. That approach also allows teams to let go of darling innovation and view the goal as learning rather than validation. 

By one estimate, 95 percent of new products fail, and baking failure into the exploratory phase helps ensure the product or service that emerges has been battle-tested. A hypothesis that doesn’t work out isn’t a capital F Failure, it’s a failure, and that feels different. 

In the case of H&M, prototyping packaging options not only led us to a paper solution that cut plastic, it also reinforced an approach to product innovation that we applied to designing automated inventory management software to cut unnecessary stock produced in their supply chain by 22 percent. That represents an enormous mitigation of waste that will help them meet their climate commitments. Even better, during these pilot programs, H&M saw a 34 percent increase in sales. 

At the roundtable, we talked about the challenge of working within a company culture that doesn’t tolerate failure. I’ve worked in a number of those environments and cultures; they’re tough. Failure carries emotional baggage. If you got a taste of it as a child and were a diligent but mostly average student like me, you did everything you could to avoid seeing that red letter atop a test ever again.

I’m currently working within a culture that makes room for failure. Some of that is inherent in the design process, which is optimistic and pragmatic. But my colleagues also share an important mindset: They focus more on impact than the idea or activity that produces it. There is a deep respect for diversity of perspective and a shared belief that if there’s a better way to do it, we’re going to do it that way. 

In IDEO’s London studio, we have a framed, handwritten quote: “I don’t hate you, I just hate your idea.” It was never intended to be framed, but it’s a fabulous reminder about not taking failure personally. If we truly share a collective goal of doing well and doing good, we need to generate and test as many ideas as we can—and be okay with killing our darlings to get there. It’s the only way to make real change.

Is your intolerance for failure holding you back? I’d love to hear more.