Balancing mistake tolerance and organizational innovation success

Business

Information Technology

Innovation requires allowing people to make mistakes. However, being wrong too many times can be fatal. Do you agree? Why or why not? What are the implications for nurturing innovation? Answer all parts of the question.

Absolutely, people have to be allowed to make mistakes. It enhances innovation, but it also helps people learn. No one is perfect, and mistakes can happen anywhere. The manager who cannot cope or has no patience with people who make mistakes will eventually alienate their staff and their peers, and they will not enhance the organization, either. Of course, being wrong continually can be fatal, and there must be a line where too many mistakes add up to discipline or other measures. However, nurturing innovation means there will be missteps along the way, and that is to be expected in the innovative environment. To nurture innovators, managers must be patient, but they must foster an environment of creativity and originality, and that means that innovators are going to fail sometimes. That is what fosters new ideas and creative solutions to problems, and so, innovation demands that people make mistakes, so they can find creative and novel ways to solve them. Some of the world's greatest ventures, from man walking on the moon, to the creation of computers and other technologies grew out of mistakes. How many rockets blew up on the launch pad before NASA got it right? How many dangers still face those who travel into space? These could be seen as "mistakes," but in actuality, they are opportunities for learning, growth, and innovation, and so, innovation has to make mistakes, or it is not innovation at all.