Fail fast - learn quickly

"You failed" 

That’s something you don’t want to hear.

We dread failure. We don’t like talking about it. Some of us will internalise and rethink our failures in our heads time and time again. Others will swipe them away, moving onto the next thing immediately. In the public we prefer sweeping our failures under the rug, silently, while nobody is watching.

While this might save our feelings momentarily, this is not the way to innovation.

Innovation, the magic word

There’s a lot of hype around innovation. Everyone wants to do it. Businesses want to deliver innovative products and services. Designers want to work on innovations projects. Judging by all the hype you’d expect a buoyant market, full of successful, usable products and services, vastly improving the end user experiences.

While this might be the case with some sectors - most traditional businesses struggle with releasing new products and services successfully, and many seem to struggle with releasing anything new to market at all. Why is this?

 

Most innovations will fail

Or as Albert Savoia - ex Googler and innovation expert said:

"Most new things will fail – even if they are flawlessly executed."

Does this mean you should stay away from trying new things (and failing in the process)? Certainly not. It just means you need to accept failure will inevitably be a part of the process.

Scientists have proven that the only significant contributor to how quickly babies learn to walk is the days of practice they’ve had. We are yet to hear of a baby that jumped out of a crib and started walking.

The baby too, has to go through a series of trials and errors, a series of successes and failures. As does any team, or individual that wants to do something new, something they’ve never done before. Innovation, in its essence is something that has never been done before.

If you take start-ups out of the equation, most businesses don’t operate in a world where failure is accepted because the cost can be so great. Even the ones that have been under the influence of the famous 'fail often, fail fast' start-up mantra, find failing a taboo topic. Allowing failure to be taboo will hinder your team’s ability to innovate.

Teams working to deliver innovation need permission to fail. If your team is afraid to fail, it will be reluctant to try new things. It’s useful to look at different types of failure and how they can help you and your team to succeed...

1. Failure in the service of success

Design projects can be costly. Development projects can be even more so. Having teams working on something that might fail is a risk. Money and people’s jobs are often at stake, so how can we even talk about failing lightly? We can’t, and we shouldn’t. The fact is that we are not talking about ‘that type’ of failing.

Failure, like most things in life, comes in different guises. Fail fast, fail often is the type of failing Lean UX is famous for. By failing (quickly) today, we can learn and make smarter decisions tomorrow.

At the beginning of any design project you and your team don’t know enough about the problem you’ve been asked to solve. You need to learn about it, usually fast. To learn you need to try things out, and you need feedback.

At this point in the design process a lot of little failures need to happen. You’ll sketch, prototype, experiment with rough concepts and solutions, you’ll gather user feedback. This will help you understand if you are solving the right problem, or if your solution is worthy of further time investment.

This is the moment in the project when you really want to try out as many different solutions as possible. You try. You fail. You learn something and you apply that learning to your next try. You try again. You fail again and you learn more. You iterate. The faster you can do this the better. Sure, there is failure in the process, but it’s planned, there’s a process and it’s helping you succeed and move towards the end goal.

Avoid costly projects by failing fast in a planned way, learning quickly and making smarter decisions.

2. Failure as a learning experience

Not all failures can stay in that safe zone of design experimentation and learning. Sometimes your whole, large scale, expensive project will fail. This is the type of failure that is very uncomfortable. It’s the type that puts budgets and people’s jobs at stake. Maybe even yours. If only there was a formula to prevent it...

Unfortunately, there is no formula. Good systems and processes can certainly minimise the number of project failures, but it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to completely wave them goodbye. What we can do is have good systems in place that help us catch issues early on and learn how to deal with failure when it happens.

If you are planning a big scale project including user centred thinking from the start can help minimise failure. Rather than thinking of user experience as an add-on that can come later, start your project with solid understanding of your user needs. Questions that are worth asking yourself:

1. Is the product or service of real benefit to the user?
2. Is it commercially viable?
3. Is it aligned with our long-term strategy?
4. Is it operationally viable?
5. Is it inline with, or even better - ahead of the market?

If you’ve passed this early concept stage and your project is in flight there are still ways to minimise failure. If your team is practicing Lean UX, daily stand-ups should be a must. These will tell you if anything is blocking your team’s and your project’s progress.

Here at cxpartners, once a project team is assembled, we do daily stand-ups both internally, and three a week with the client. It helps us keep projects on track. Anticipating blockers and catching them early helps minimize failure.

At the end of a project we organise project wash-ups. The team that was working on a project gets together in a room to talk about what went well and what didn’t. Everyone who was involved in the project is invited, from project manager to the UX designer - the washup is part of the project plan from the outset.

Once there we discuss what worked and what didn’t, capturing actions and learnings for the next project to feedback to the wider team improving methods and processes.

It’s a great way of ensuring everyone walks away from a project a little smarter. And a little happier. If any failures happened, people can reflect and have a better chance of succeeding next time.

Teams need processes and systems in place to help them catch failures early on and to help them deal with failure when it happens.

3. Failure, when it gets personal

The third type of failure is where you’ve got the lead role, your own personal failure. You’ve aimed to achieve something. You’ve made a mistake, a wrong judgment, and you’ve failed. There is good news. This is the type of failure that is easiest to correct.

If a large scale project fails, it is often time-consuming to identify which part failed and why - there are lots of moving parts, lots of contributors. With personal failure you are in control - you decide how and when to correct it. You decide how to avoid failure in the future.

While personal failure is often the easiest to correct, it’s the hardest to talk about. It shows you’re vulnerable, and that you too make mistakes. Talking about it is hard and requires strength. But it’s important. It gives you the opportunity to share what you’ve learnt. If you can share your story honestly, it can show a far greater strength than any avoidance game. It builds trust to share these failures and connects people.

Who would you rather work with - someone who admits they’ve made mistake and can tell you what they’ve learnt from them, or with someone who fears talking about their failures, and is prepared to talk only about their successes?

Accept failure, but aim to succeed

Understanding failure is important. Not because it’s particularly useful to dwell on mistakes, it’s not. Nor because we should aim to fail, we most certainly shouldn't. But because we can’t try new things without failing, and because reflecting on mistakes is so crucial to learning. It’s crucial to growing, and crucial to any success.

Why not use everything we can, including failure - to win and succeed faster.

What about you, how do you or your team deal with failure? What processes or systems are you using to to minimise failure, or learn from it when it happens? What do you think about the link between failure and innovation? It would be great to hear from you in the comments.