Image: Loan Walker, Oostend, BE April, 2025
Connecting Dots is the monthly newsletter for innovation leaders by Brett Macfarlane.
◎⁃◎
What to do When: Your innovation is seen to be a failure?
You get R.E.A.L.
Eventually, if you're an ambitious innovation leader, you're going to fail.
By failure, I don't mean a quick test, exploration or sprint. I mean a major investment of effort, resources, and reputation driving a bold proposition with big expectations of return—that hits a wall.
That wall might invalidate your core hypothesis. More often, it's unrelated to the innovation's merits and built from bricks of organizational resistance despite positive results.
I've seen it up close: "bet the farm" innovation initiatives achieving external market or technical validation yet failing internal cultural, political, or emotional buy-in.
These situations cut deeper than "fail fast" platitudes or "learning culture" aspirations. Even the most innovative companies are littered with unrealized, high-potential ideas killed by internal rejection, not external failure.
Just as there's no single process for innovation, there's no single reason it Fails with a capital F. When you've been head-down driving the work, it's hard to see from inside the bottle to see the label of why, where, or how the resistance formed.
The impulse is to withdraw. Instead, stay in. Shape the conversation—and actions—that follow.
The R.E.A.L. Recovery Process:
Reassert Control
Evaluate Causality
Accept Responsibility
Learn Forward
Reassert Control
While you may not control the outcome, you control the response. The decision that your innovation is a failure likely came quietly from somewhere else in the constellation of actors directly and indirectly in your orbit.
Long-term reputation matters. Reaffirm the reasons for the initiative, link it to executive strategic priorities, avoid blaming, and defend your team. The goal isn't to win but to demonstrate integrity with your logic and actions, however you’re feeling.
Observe how others respond to the perceived failure and identify a cadre of high-integrity colleagues who will join you in a future initiative or defend you today in the halls, emails, coffee corners, and Slack groups where reputations are forged for better or worse.
A classic mistake is waiting until the post-mortem. By then, the lore and consequences of “what happened” will be imprinted throughout the organization.
Evaluate Causality
After committing to backing innovation, it can be brutal when failure reaches finality. Whether a call, an email, or remarks in a meeting, the moment it hits is devastating. Your commitment, intelligence, resilience, alliance-building, and dark arts have run their course.
Rarely is it obvious or a simple mistake that first comes to sight. Instead, while it's fresh, go into full investigation mode. Think CSI: Innovation Edition.
Step back from the work and get a broad sheet of paper or a whiteboard. Document a stakeholder map of everyone involved along the way—directly and, more importantly, indirectly. As you do this, blind spots will emerge about who wasn't engaged, who was forgotten, or who wasn't thought about.
If you haven't already noted some revelations, draw lines of connection: green for good, red for conflictual, yellow for variable, and a jagged line for unknown. In this map will surface what was missed—not due to carelessness or ill will, but simply the phenomenological reality of any organization and group of people trying to do something new for the first time.
Identifying causality to day gives you a behavioural night vision in the future to see patterns or dynamics in shadows that were previously invisible
Be kind to yourself. This exercise is about wisdom, not retribution.
Accept Responsibility
A leader's job is to drive change by working with other people to achieve your goals. Paradoxically, while you may have authority, you will never have complete control.
In my research with highly accomplished and even famous innovation leaders, they all experienced failures along the way. Though few responded the same way twice, the better responses came when the individual accepted their responsibility as the protagonist of the initiative.
Even if unspoken, others may have seen the wall closing in before you. So it's not the ending that determines the reputational impact, but your response. Even if someone acted badly, maliciously or Machiavellian, you remain in control of your response, and you were the one in the leader’s seat.
It's a hard pill to swallow, but the best response is to accept that you missed something. It could have been subtle behavioural signals from colleagues, an external market shift, or your own unwillingness to proactively kill or change the initiative when warning signs emerged.
Taking responsibility may be hard, but it builds new strength rather than perpetuates old blind spots.
Learn Forward
Just as success is not final, failure needn’t fatal in one’s career. Going through the R.E.A.L. process helps leaders learn new skills, maintain their resilience, and keep a good enough grasp on reality in what can be a demanding exercise.
Typically, the Evaluate and Accept phases identify capability gaps or sharpen a leader's sensors and practices to influence and guide the innovation and change that you aspire to as executives.
Real learning is hard because you have to let go of the delusion that you already know everything and discover the limits of your capabilities and, at the same time, the limits of your organization. After all, an organization can only innovate as much as it can tolerate change. And sometimes it takes a big failure to learn that the organization isn't up to the task. Or that it’s you who projected onto the organization your own ambitions, at odds with company goals.
Hence, it's important you also pay attention to failures of your colleagues in case they surface learning for your work and to be a supportive ally. After all, how we respond to the failures of others tells us how we might respond to our own. Good to know for next time
◎⁃◎
Questions, reflections and feedback to info@brettmacfarlane.com