We need to talk about Failure

Something that is riling me up right now, is the use of general terms when there is a LOT of variation in what we are meaning. There are many - leadership, culture, success, diversity and inclusion - all of these have as many layers to them as people have reckons about them. Don’t get me started on all of those as I could go on for hours, so let's talk about one of my favourites - what it means to ‘Fail’.

“Fail Fast, Fail often” is bandied around a lot these days. Ironically this was what I saw when I just googled ‘Fail Fast’:

So which is it, Forbes?

It would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous. Even Facebook, whose mantra was ‘Move fast and break things’ has decided to somewhat modify this.

I’m going to break this down into two categories: doing things intentionally, and doing things unintentionally.

‘Intentional Failure’ can be defined as not knowing whether something will work or not, and trying it to find out. This can be seen in experiments, when testing a hypothesis could bring back a positive or negative result. In product terms, this may be creating a simple prototype and testing the market with it so you can learn. The principles behind Agile and Lean practices are all about ‘inspect and adapt’. Test Driven Development begins with failing tests, and the goal is to write code so that it passes. All of these ‘fails’ are on purpose, and I love being involved with all of these things. It's where we learn a lot about what we are trying to achieve. 

‘Unintentional Failure’ as you can imagine, is more about mistakes. It’s about dropping the ball on something, incompetence, or having neglected to do something and there being negative consequences. Getting to the end of a situation or goal and it not being viable can be seen in this light too, although it’s not so much about mistakes, it about things not working out and it being unexpected. Are these bad? If we learn nothing from them and are bound to repeat them, then definitely.

Is it important to differentiate between these? In my view, yes, so we can clearly set expectations with people in our team. All failure comes at a cost, regardless of whether it's intentional or unintentional. The difference with intentional failure is that you hope the value of what you learn is greater than the cost to learn it. That's what you sign up for. You always come out of failure with regrets - to an extent, no regrets means no learning. But, if the regret costs you personally at a moral or ethical level, or costs you trust from your organisation, then the cost is too high. Some managers can wield failure like a large stick, leaving low levels of trust and psychological safety in your organisation. 

Startups are ‘Intentional Failure’ organisations by design. They typically have a higher risk appetite, mainly driven by runway limitations, and the expectation that you learn what your value proposition is quickly - investors have backed you for a particular outcome, or under the understanding that you and your team will find value. 

We need to be clear about the level of failure we are up for, go in with laser focus on the lessons we are trying to learn, and do so with control, not chaos. Then people can understand the boundaries of how they can experiment, can do so independently, which speeds the whole thing up. 

At a people management level, we cannot expect a ‘mistake free’ environment. There will be fails that people feel deeply, and our role in this is not to haul them over the coals for every mistake, it is to encourage them to reflect and assess how they will avoid this in future. If the same thing happens repeatedly then it is clear they are not learning, and action may need to be taken - but again, that depends on the seriousness of the failure and the cost of it. If someone regularly fails on the same avoidable things with all data and assistance available to them, then competence is likely the issue. 

We need to be clear that it's not about failing fast in its most general term - it's about cost to value ratios within your organisation, doing things intentionally and in a controlled way, and taking ownership of the outcomes. If they are the right things to learn from then you’ll likely have a good outcome. If it's random, inconsistent and uncontrolled, this can be damaging to people and your company, and will likely lead to an unhealthy culture, and unclear product outcomes. Be explicit about both sides of this equation, talk about it often and demonstrate it to be true, every time failure happens.