Failures Should Also Be Counted As KPIs

Most organizations tend to measure success and conceal, justify or forget failure. This distorted performance measurement leads to failure being more revealing than success, as teams may hit targets under the surface with accumulating unacknowledged, unmanaged risks, bad decisions, weak processes or practices which cannot be sustained.Balance score cards lead us to optimize for appearance, not learning. Failures then should be counted as KPIs as well, not to punish people for every mistake but to make institutional learning visible and measurable. No failures reported does not necessarily mean good performance; sometimes it is the other way round. It is out of fear hiding lack of transparency or risk averse employment culture. Failures, which are penalized in the system lead to defensive behavior rather than innovation. Experimentation stops, people evade responsibility, decisions are postponed and their personal safety becomes more important. A correct way to report tracking failures in fact inverts the whole purpose of measuring itself.Not only organizations would evaluate, "How much success we achieved?", but it would ask: What keep failing all the time?

What processes give rise to preventable errors?If a problem occurs, how rapidly are it identified and resolved?

Are we making mistakes and learning from them or just covering them up?Intelligent, unintended failures are distinguished from irresponsible failures in high performing organizations.An intelligent failure results from striving disruption innovation, or solving complex or uncertain problems, while a negligent failure stems from inattention, avoiding responsibility, or consistent denial of known problems.When these two types of failure are indistinguishable, organizational learning is destroyed.

When every failure is punished, workers learn that silence rather than honesty is the safer course of action.How often the incident occurs, Process failures, Customer complaints. Repeatedly.

Delay, in the first place, may be preplanned by obvious specification or limitation.Otherwise, it is unpredictable.

For example, delay reads, the "waiting" is a major part of the integration. And corrective actions taken afterwards.

My point is not to normalize incompetence.

The point is to normalize transparency.

An organization that only measures success will at some point become blind to its own failures. Yet an organization that is able to systematically analyze its failures will create something that cannot be lost, permanent success: adaptive, evolving learning.