Learning is Proportional to the Accountability

New research proves that people only confront failures when they cannot find ways to attribute failure with something – or someone – else.  But when we avoid accountability, we detach ourselves from learning.

In the recent working paper of HBS (Harvard Business School), researchers identify, “How internal attribution and ambiguity of responsibility affect learning from failure.” Almost every one of us have had heard many quotes from intellects, emphasizing on the connection between “Success & Failure,” “Failure & Learning”, and “Experience & Failure.”

For instance, take a look on Bill Gates’ famous saying, “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

To explain why most of the saints, scholars, and other super minds always link success with failure is straightforward, because they never found a way to success other than failed experiences. In other words, they got learning from failures and sooner or later, make themselves accountable to combat failure without giving excuses and reasoning or blaming external circumstances.

But in some cases, where a person is unclear if he/she is directly responsible for the failure then there is chance that a person would not attribute the failure internally and ultimately less likely to learn from failure. The dilemma of real world is that we cannot easily decrease the ambiguity of responsibility when it comes to failure because most of our assignments and projects involve team players and colleagues as well.

So is there any way managers can encourage learning without accusing others of responsibility?

One of the authors of working HBS paper, Christopher G. Myers, gives some recommendations;

1)      Remove barriers creating ambiguity in the priority.

2)      Carefully designing the job roles, scope of responsibilities and reporting structure.

3)      Creating a psychological safe culture within the organization, where employees are encouraged to accept and learn from failure.

4)      Make a norm of experiencing new tasks as the challenging opportunity for learning process, rather than as a threatening stress.

5)      Analyzing root-cause of the failure without penalizing anyone when team fails, this can increase the thirst for learning among employees.

In my experience, learning is more about failure than success. When a person fails, his curiosity for success increases but the person should be sincerely curious about his work and life. In the end, all we need is to prepare ourselves to be accountable and responsible for the particular failed attempt rather than pinpointing others and uncontrollable external factors.

How beautifully it is summarized by Zig Zigler in just once sentence,

“If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost.”

Learning is Proportional to the Accountability