Let’s (not) Celebrate Failure

How American corporate culture struggles with the idea of self-improvement

Steve Harvey

This post is a continuation of my story about the Chief Innovation Officer summit in San Francisco I attended a couple weeks ago. Last time I wrote about the strange (and fun!) phenomenon of innovation. Today, I’d like to elaborate on the even more ambiguous concept of failure in the American corporate culture.

Risk, yikes!

At the conference, I had a lot of fun watching businesspeople talk about risk. I loved how everyone danced around the concept, trying to lull the attendees into a sense of fatalistic acceptance:

You need to throw money into the fire to appease the unnamed innovation gods. It’s okay to fail, you need to celebrate those moments.

The speakers did their best to convince the audience that failure is somehow not an embarrassement, that it is needed in the product creation process. I felt they didn’t know what they were talking about. They didn’t go into detail. They didn’t present any practical examples. They told stories about concepts that were alien to them. Frowns intensified. The collective resistance in the room was palpable. Q&A sessions were quiet.

What? What is this lady blabbering about? Why would I want to fail? How can I fund a project and set it up for defeat? Why the hell would I brag about screwing up? What will that do to my bottom line, my goals/targets/P&L/<insert business metric here>?

Yeah. If you try to plant an idea that failure is okay in a mind bred in a culture where absolute, quantifiable success is the only option — you’re going to have a bad time.

I think the problem started within the language and was later magnified by the principles of capitalism. Let’s break it down.

Etymology

Failure happens when something doesn’t work or doesn’t go as planned. It is the opposite of intended results. It’s always been and will remain a negative outcome. Attempts to shift the meaning with additional context have been largely unsuccessful because language takes time to evolve. You can’t just say “let’s celebrate failure” and hope it goes over well by painting the worst possible scenario pink with a pretty verb.

Capitalism

In this system, success is measured by maximizing profits, accumulating capital and eliminating the competition. To succeed means to prevail, be rich and crush others. Establish domination. And if failure is the opposite of success, then… you see where this is going? Businesspeople freak out when they hear about failure because it couldn’t be more against the principles they live by. Embracing failure means suicide.

A Different Angle

Tanja Heffner

I think success and failure are not mutually exclusive. I’ll take it further: I’m pretty sure that failure is the shortest path to success. Failure is amazingly helpful and you need to accept just one condition to make it work:

Failure is not the negative outcome, failure is a way to learn.

To learn is to grow. If you accept that, your goals shift: it’s not about numbers or praise anymore, it’s about getting better. Hazel Gale describes the mindset extremely succinctly:

The growth mindset individual though, will feel successful, worthy, and purposeful when they’re learning. What this essentially means is that failure, as a concrete idea or our general understanding of it, doesn’t really exist, because the harder a task or an undertaking is, the more we stand to grow as a result of doing it — even if we don’t do it perfectly. With a growth mindset, we welcome challenge because instant success and recognition are not the ultimate goals.

This mindset is potentially incompatible with the American corporate culture, built on the principles of capitalism. However, it was adopted by many successful entrepreneurs, so maybe it’s not a lost cause?

Here’s the best part: if you become a student, failure evaporates. When you commit to experimentation instead of pursuit of profit, there is no way you can’t benefit from what you’re building. When every initiative’s goal is to take away data or reflections, it is an automatic success. Any experiment yields some results, right?

Let’s break down how results you’r not looking for can help you:

1. You learn something you weren’t expecting: surprises are good. Look for them. They can stimulate innovation and an unexpected change of direction in your strategy.
2. You learn something you don’t like: maybe your assumption was wrong? It’s a great opportunity for insight and a reminder that most likely you‘re not your target audience.
3. You learn something that isn’t helpful: negative results are fantastic, because they tell you exactly which direction to move away from. Quickly close that door and go elsewhere.
4. You learn nothing: it’s pretty likely that your methodology is broken. Tweak the experiment itself. Improve, iterate, rinse and repeat. Results will be different next time around, guaranteed.

Experimentation Done Right

Markus Spiske

Principle 1: Strive to Actually Help People

I believe the end game for any business should be to help people. If you engage your audience in the product creation process, you will give them what they’re asking for and more. You will do amazing, unexpected and focused things — it’s remarkable how effective collaborative innovation is.

Principle 2: Stay In The Driver’s Seat

Listening intently doesn’t mean you need to adhere to it all without question. Carefully balance incoming feedback with your own vision. Everyone participates but you’re still the boss. Your position is conducive to insight which may lead to radical improvements people do not expect at all. You will find recipes for pivots while reading between the lines of user feedback.

Principle 3: Run Quick and Cheap

The biggest obstacle American corporate culture has with innovation and failure is cost. Why would I spend tons of money on initiatives which I won’t profit from? There are two aspects which can soften the blow:

1. Remember, profit is not your goal anymore. You want to learn first and profit will come naturally if you‘re a good student.
2. You don’t need to spend millions to learn.

Entrepreneurs, designers and engineers all over the globe have been honing increasingly efficient methods of quick, cheap and fruitful experimentation. Let’s name a few:

1. Build prototypes: people react differently to approximations of the actual product rather than static mockups, no matter how pretty they are. Pictures elicit feedback related to their visual aspects: aesthetics, layout, colors, typography. These are important, but they never tell the full story. If a tester can actually play with an approximation of your product, their mind kicks into a different gear. They pay attention to ease of use, learning curve and convenience. You observe not an emotional (dis)pleasure caused by observing a static piece of art, but a spontaneous response to a living product: engagement, delight, frustration or confusion. The stuff that will make or break your product. With interactive prototypes, value of feedback skyrockets. You shouldn’t show anything else to people.
2. Run usability studies. Make them informal and as regular as sprint reviews. Ask simple, non-guiding questions. Show your product to random people. Show it to tough use cases outside of your target audience. Gather spontaneous, unbiased feedback. Observe behaviors, unprompted reactions and implicit communication through body language and facial expressions. Sincerely observe how real people use your product.
3. Go agile. Forget 12-month plans and gantt charts with spiderwebs of dependencies. Enter the zen state of planning without planning. Respond to change. One week sprints and continuous, disciplined reviews. Even the most insurmountable task can be achieved if you break it down into small chunks, set up meaningful milestones and learn from them intently.
4. Go lean. It allows you to eliminate uncertainty and focus on learning. Force yourself to ask important, uncomfortable questions upfront. Spend as little as possible. And then take it further — R.A.T. is a very cool concept, which reinforces the 80/20 rule: your first release should help you answer the toughest, existential questions about your business strategy.

Don’t Worry

Failure is not the opposite of success, but a means to achieve it. The idea of failure is embraced by successful entrepreneurs not because they’re masochists: they simply see tremendous value in growing their businesses by learning, collaborating and iterating. If every lesson is an opportunity to get closer to your customer and serve them better, failure doesn’t exist anymore.

It makes a lot of sense now. Historically at Sourcebits, we struggled to explain the value of our innovation offering to large customers. People didn’t treat us seriously because we never addressed failure. It was never a problem for us, as the growth mindset has always been a part of our culture. Pillocks. It’s helpful to finally have the full picture.

You just survived part two of my saga about a conference I didn’t like but learned a ton from. Here is part one if you missed it.