Not long ago, it became fashionable to embrace failure as a sign of a company’s willingness to take risks. This trend lost favor as executives recognized that what they wanted was learning, not necessarily failure. Every failure can be attributed to a raft of missteps, and many failures do not automatically contribute to future success.
Certainly, if companies want to aggressively pursue learning, they must accept that failures will happen. But the practice of simply setting goals and then being nonchalant if they fail is inadequate.
Instead, companies should focus organizational energy on hypothesis generation and testing. Hypotheses force individuals to articulate in advance why they believe a given course of action will succeed. A failure then exposes an incorrect hypothesis — which can more reliably convert into organizational learning.
Source: Why Hypotheses Beat Goals