Idea · carried by 2 sources
Reward Learning, Not Outcomes
To create a culture where people are willing to make bets and take risks, reward the learning from decisions — not just the successful outcomes. Even a bad decision that teaches you something about your customers or business is valuable.
Where it comes from
Anneka Gupta articulated this as the foundation for a risk-taking product culture. From the conversation: > The way to make a culture of risk-taking and people willing to make these bets and go out on a limb is to reward the learning versus the outcome. That's what I try to focus on: if we're constantly learning, it is okay if we make bad decisions — but we learn from them and we get better for next time. And even in making this bad decision, we learned something about our customers or our business that we otherwise wouldn't have learned.
If people fear being punished for bad outcomes, they'll avoid making decisions at all — which is worse than making a bad decision, because you learn nothing. Shift the reward structure from outcomes to learning velocity.