Fail fast, fail often, fail cheap
Learn and carry on
The title for this post basically says everything I want to say on this matter. It sums up perfectly what I believe to be a good strategy. If anything, failing is an excellent learning experience.
Let us think a little bit about it. As children we learn a lot (of not almost everything) from our failures, our mistakes. It’s our curiosity to experiment and try new things that make us fail and learn at the same time. It’s a beautiful principle that seems to elude us in adulthood.
And why is that? Why the change in paradigm? We might reason “well, we’re not kids anymore so we must not act like one”. True, true! But, nonetheless, if that’s a strategy that works so well shouldn’t we at least take something from it?
The answer to that is culture. It’s our adulthood culture, corporate culture and so on that makes us abandon that philosophy. When we shift from children to adults, failure is not seen as a part of learning but starts to be seen as a bad thing.
Is that correct? I’m not an expert but I believe not. And some companies are starting to believe in that too. If we expect to empower people to push boundaries, we have to create a culture where failure is part of success. Failure is one of the possible and valid outcomes of anything that’s done and should be celebrated as a success.
Going back to the title, I really do believe that’s a reasonable approach to failure. As a software engineer, that’s something I can really work with. Failure should be part of the day-to-day processes. Failure should come as fast as possible and it should be as cheap as possible to recover.
What does that allow us? No fear of failing. Change becomes quick and cheap. New things are tried on a daily basis. No “what if we’ve tried that” hangs in the air. If anything, things start to get more interesting.
Let us think collectively about it. Celebrating failure will only, really, work if we change our culture. If there’s no “discrimination“, no looking sideways. Let’s all embrace it, failing fast, often and cheaply.
