Think of a work-related failure that you experienced or you are aware of and aft

Question

Think of a work-related failure that you experienced or you are aware of and after describing it, answer the following questions: • What individual and/or organizational factors might have contributed to the failure? • What was the manager's or organization's reaction to the failure? How does that reaction compare to what you learned in this week's lesson? • Did it become a learning experience? If so, in what way? If not, why not? • Based on what your learned would you describe this organization as innovative? Why or why not? This week we focused on the culture of failure. There are many legends about the innovative success of companies and their founders, including great financial rewards. Microsoft and Google both started life in a garage and their founders are now billionaires! Innovative companies should also accept that the innovation process is messy.. It’s easy to assume that the products or processes in these stories were “light bulb” ideas, generated in full form and ready for the market. What we don’t usually hear about are products that were tested by these same companies but were not successful, about the financial investments made in trial products that never earned a return.

Explanation / Answer

The description

I used to work for a manufacturing company. Once we launched a minor change variant of one of our old car models. There was a change in the gearbox. After a few weeks of the model launch, we found some problems reported from the market regarding the gear lever getting free (i.e. automatically shifting to neutral) during jerks on the road. Upon investigation, it was found that there was an issue in the design stage and the design engineer was held responsible. The company did recall and the responsible engineer also got penalized officially and otherwise in his career as well.

What individual and/or organizational factors might have contributed to the failure?

There was a very little individual factor involved in this matter. The design was collective done by a team and the team also had reviews of the design at every stage. Still, the failure hapenned. Organization and team-related factors were most significant in this case because the design team was very new and the team members were from the same department, they didn't have solid cohesion among themselves due to competitive pressure of performance in the team/ department. The chain of command and the level of reviews also didn't work well because the system was inflexible and the reviewers were just checking broad outlines of design not looking at intricate details. Moreover, there was a lack of ownership visible among the team members.

What was the manager's or organization's reaction to the failure? How does that reaction compare to what you learned in this week's lesson?

The organization and the division were not ready to accept the failure. This is good from the system point of view but unfortunately, they were not focusing on the system but on a single person - the design engineer for this failure. Also, they were hardly ready to learn some lesson from the entire incident rather they were focusing on how to modify the appraisal system and to have a stringent policing on people designing on failure. It also seemed at that point that the organization was not ready to accept that failures may happen from any new initiative and people are targeted for these failures, innovations will cease to exist in the organization. Overall, a practice of hiding things under the carpet was visible which goes exactly opposite of an innovation culture which demands an open culture.

Did it become a learning experience? If so, in what way? If not, why not?

It had a great potential for learning because the team would innovate in the future for other emerging models where the level of innovation needs to be much advance. But unfortunately, that didn't happen at least at the organization level because of the stubbornness and rigidity in the culture and targeting the people instead of the system. If the people responsible would have been supported and nurtured, they could have gotten much confidence and they could have enhanced their learning in a more evolved manner in the future.

Based on what your learned would you describe this organization as innovative? Why or why not?

As it has been already mentioned, the culture of the organization was rigid (which has changed considerably nowadays!) or inflexible. The adaptability and room for tolerance in keeping people motivated to innovate were low. Also, the robustness in the design process and the system behind that to check and ensure that failures do not happen and if at all happens, it happens in the earliest phase of the project. We will thus not conclude that the organization had an innovative culture at least at that point in time.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse T
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.