The Role of Failure in Innovation
Lessons from a Workshop with The Failure Toy
Jared Teicher, Senior Marketing Manager at the Bank of Montreal (BMO), shares why he and his leadership team brought Twenty One Toys’ Failure Toy into their strategy and enablement/marketing team’s workshop. Tasked with fostering BMO’s “winning culture” across dispersed regions, their goal for the day was clear: celebrate, acknowledge, empower, and connect their team to their new strategy and to each other.
Why Failure? As Jared explains:
“Failure wasn’t looked at as a bad thing; it was seen as a necessary step for us to succeed as a team.”
“If you shy away from failure, you shy away from experience and the opportunity to deliver a better end product.”
Once the Games Began… “We’re here to have fun, but we’re also here to learn.”
“It was the best way I could think of to kick off our full-day offsite. With so much content coming at the teams, getting them out of their seats and playing with toys was an amazing way to set the tone for the day.”
Key Takeaways and Insights from the Participants
As the games unfolded, so did the insights. Hear what participants had to say as they reflected on their experience through gameplay:
"Expectations may change throughout the project, and that's okay!"
"We reset the expectation, but we were very open and transparent about it: 'Let’s just make a structure that doesn’t fall.' I think when we work on projects every day, collaborate with teams, and communicate what success looks like, it’s important to acknowledge that expectations may change throughout the project and to be okay with that.”
"Don’t rest on your laurels; always make sure that you’re working towards being better than you were the last time."
"I started to think at the end about the difference between kind of external winning and internal winning. The first time around the external winning was beating everybody else. And so when we came from our previous tables, we had really good scores to begin with and we kind of finished a really good working sculpture to begin with. And then we got cocky and started heckling the competition and then karma hit us hard. And so that to me was an internal win in realizing like, don't rest on your laurels. Always make sure that you're working towards being better than you were at that time, and not just kind of accepting that you're a winner all the time,'cause nobody is.I started to think at the end about the difference between external winning and internal winning. The first time around, external winning was beating everybody else. When we came from our previous tables, we had really good scores to begin with, and we kind of finished with a really good working sculpture. And then we got cocky and started heckling the competition, and then karma hit us hard. And so that, to me, was an internal winrealizing, like, don't rest on your laurels. Always make sure that you're working towards being better than you were at that time, and not just kind of accepting that you're a winner all the time, 'cause nobody is.”
"Instead of what failed, we started with why ours worked better than last time."
"Because we were on different teams before, instead of focusing on what failed, we started with why ours worked better the last time around at the prior table. Rather than asking how we could improve, we said, 'No, I think my way is better, his way is better, her way is better.' From there, we decided, 'Okay, let's build it.' Once we built it, we realized, 'I think we need to re-strategize the whole thing again because this is a whole new team, and we need to figure out how the dynamics will work within this new group.' That was a key learning for me—you have to take a step back to move two steps forward.”
"We tripled our experience level because we all came from different backgrounds."
"We all came from different teams, so then automatically we had three sets of experience over just one set of experience. And I think that's what a lot of people noticed is like, oh, we tripled our experience level because we all came from different backgrounds and we were able to share best learnings and what did work, what didn't work, and be able to do a lot better than at least Mike and I had done previously."“We all came from different teams, so then, automatically, we had three sets of experience over just one set of experience. And I think that's what a lot of people noticed, like, 'Oh, we tripled our experience level because we all came from different backgrounds and we were able to share best learnings and what did work, what didn't work, and be able to do a lot better than at least Mike and I had done previously.”
"Thinking something might work doesn’t always work."
"I think one of the important takeaways was 'test and learn,' being able to try something you think might work, even though it doesn’t always succeed. It was about putting ideas into practice and seeing if they held up. We kept talking and constantly tested the structure, removing the pink blocks to see if it would still stand, but it failed every time. Now that the pink blocks are removed, though, it’s somehow standing, which is a surprise to all of us.”
"It’s easy to think in terms of logic... rather than creativity."
"It’s easy to start with logic and think in terms of data and analytics rather than creativity. I think the spaghetti challenge showed that kindergartners were always the most successful because they played and embraced creativity rather than overanalyzing. Meanwhile, we were focused on balancing and weighing structures logically, without realizing that the tallest ones in the room didn’t necessarily look logical, but they worked.”