Senior HR Executive Conference - How much failure can we really embrace?

Today and tomorrow I am attending the Conference Board Senior HR Executive Conference in New York City. I plan on sharing as many interesting ideas and concepts as I can from the sessions and conversations over the next few days.

One of the common themes that has emerged early on Day One is the pressing need for organizations to continue to innovate, often faster than ever before, more effectively than the competition, and in a manner than can be sustainable and repeatable. A tall order for sure, particularly when faced with flat or declining resources, an increasingly stressed and maxed-out workforce, and for large public companies, the need to be aware of and to meet extremely short-term financial objectives. In the opening keynote from Steve Fussel from Abbott as well as in a later panel discussion with HR executives from Nike, Cisco, and AMD the various leaders talked about the need to accept, embrace, and most importantly learn from failures as a key component of the innovation process or life cycle. It was generally stated that failure is and must be a part of game, a kind of table stakes for sitting down at the innovation table.

But what was not really discussed was just how much failure was acceptable and would actually be tolerated as a by-product of a commitment to an innovation program or culture. While 'failure' and learning from those failures as a concept sounds great, and is sort of easy to talk about as a core component of the company innovation approach, each failure eventually has to get ascribed to either an individual, team, region, something more discrete and tangible than the more amorphous 'culture'. When the discussion turned to just how much risk, and theoretically how much potential for failure should be tolerated, one comment was 'it's ok to risk your own job, just don't risk the entire company.'

Which gets us to the main challenge I think about risk, failure, opportunity, and innovation. We want, no check that, we need to get faster, more creative, more innovative, and frankly better than before. But at the same time, with margins razor-thin, an unforgiving economic climate, and many employees happy to avoid the kinds of risk that might jeopardize their jobs, balancing innovation, risk, and consequences of failure could be the greatest challenge for leaders tasked with finding the next billion dollar idea.

What do you think - is there a 'right' amount of failure? How much is too much?