How the boss of Ikea gives his workers permission to fail

Many corporate leaders praise innovation but are less vocal about failure. That’s not the case for the CEO of Ikea‘s owner — he hands out “banana cards.”

Jesper Brodin, boss of Ingka Group, said in a podcast interview with Norges Bank Investment Management CEO Nicolai Tangen that the idea came directly from employee feedback.

“A big group of Ikea colleagues said openly that we feel sometimes afraid of daring to make mistakes. What would be the consequences?” Brodin said in the episode released on Wednesday.

To ease those fears, he created a symbolic gesture: “I invented this card where I basically cosign in advance for your mistake. And I’ve handed that out to a lot of people.”

Brodin said the “banana card” sent a clear message to staff: take risks, and that it’s OK to fail.

“I actually do follow up with everyone who I handed this card to,” he added. “But more as an encouragement to say: if you do a mistake and you look for somebody to share that burden with, you can count on me.”

It’s not clear why Brodin calls them “banana cards,” and Ingka Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The initiative is part of Brodin’s broader push to keep Ikea agile and entrepreneurial, despite its global scale. He took up the role in late 2017.

“The biggest threat for us today, besides things like climate change, economic turmoil, would be our internal capability to actually be entrepreneurs,” he said.

With about 216,000 employees globally, Brodin said complexity and inertia were constant risks for Ikea.

“Being part of a big system, there is always a force of nature that invites you to make things more complicated — maybe a little bit too many experts, too many meetings, and so on,” he said.

“So you need to constantly try to cut down on meetings, encourage people to take decisions, to take risks, to dare to do mistakes.”

For Brodin, Ikea’s future hinged on being bold. “If you have an idea and you don’t act on it, there’s something dying inside,” he said. “For us, it’s important to be a live community of people who go for their ideas and continue to look for the next horizon.”

A number of prominent tech and business leaders share Brodin’s belief that failure is essential for innovation.

British inventor James Dyson has said he built more than 5,000 prototypes before launching his bagless vacuum cleaner in 1993, telling The Wall Street Journal in April that real wisdom comes from experience.

Elon Musk told the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in Boston in 2015: “Anything which is significantly innovative is going to come with a significant risk of failure.”

Meanwhile, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos put it simply in a 2015 letter to shareholders: “Failure and invention are inseparable twins.”

Steve Jobs, the late Apple cofounder, also spoke about the value of failure in Silicon Valley.

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