Dealing with Failure (Startups vs Public Sector)
This is part of a series of articles I’m writing inspired by the #OneTeamGov movement.
I’m a big fan of the OneTeamGov Principles (open, practical, experiment, inclusive, caring, borderless, tech-centric) and to a certain degree I live them every day in my tech startup. But many large *cough* public sector *cough* organisations may struggle to do the same.
Let’s be clear from the start, I get that startups aren’t the same as public sector. But given a blank slate, my guess is that more public sector organisations would like to operate as startups than vice-versa.
At the heart of the OneTeamGov approach is cultural shift. A change in the way decision making is approached, measured and rewarded. One of the areas of this kind of cultural change that fascinates me most is the way a organisation approaches the concept of “failure”.
About Failure
In my view failure is not an absolute, it’s contextual and perceptual. It’s not just a simple outcome, it’s based on how people in an organisation feel about the outcome, how it looks next to other outcomes. Without failure, you can’t have success. Failure is inevitable.
But within some organisations, failure is the end of a project, or a career. In these settings, it is probably very hard to be <open, practical, experiment, inclusive, caring, borderless, tech-centric>. Failure is something to be hidden, ignored, swallowed and burnt in back gardens at night. Organisations that fear failure say:
- “Failure erodes trust in us”
- “Failure costs us time/money”
- “Failure should result in punishment”
These may sound reasonable to a layman. But just like any medicine, if you take too much of it, it becomes poisonous. When failure is dangerous enough to end a career, new behaviours can manifest to avoid it. In organisations where failure is unacceptable, you will hear things like:
- “It was too hard to measure <insert project>, so we’ve not measured it”
- “We can’t take the risk of doing <insert project>, so we’ve not started it”
In the worst cases failures are covered up, continuous improvement processes are undermined and innovation dries up. The organisation stagnates.
Positive Failure
For me “failure” is just a semantic issue, that if left unchecked, ruins decision making. What about failures, where the value of success, so far outweighs the potential loss that the risk is worth taking? Would someone who ran the risk of those kinds of failures be more damaging than someone who did nothing?
My experience of founding startups tends to centre around this idea. Make the failure so small, or the success so valuable, that it’s worth taking the risk. The other choice is to do nothing, which is not an option for a founder. Do or die, there is no other.
In fact, I’d suggest its so common in startups, that arguably two of the most popular startup concepts are aligned entirely around failure. Lean and Agile.
Lean in 3 phrases
For those not initiated in The Lean Startup movement I’d summarise it through the statements of three people:
- Steve Blank — “get out of the office, you won’t learn there“
- Eric Reis — “build the smallest thing to test”
- Ash Mayura — “record and test your hypotheses methodically”
Lean is all about increasing the value.
Agile in 5 ideas
For those uninitiated in Agile, I’d suggest thinking about a few concepts:
- Small teams — get the right people in the room, but no more
- Sprints —take the shortest amount of time to do something meaningful, but no more
- Standups — Over communication is better than assumption
- Prioritisation — be ruthless about what/how you build
- Kanban — Don’t pretend to know when uncertain deliverables will be delivered
Agile is all about reducing the cost of being wrong.
Back to the OTG Principles
Delivering the OneTeamGov Principles in the public sector is a cultural challenge. Through Lean & Agile, there are well documented models that truly support the mindset. Combining Lean and Agile to tackle a culture of failure, could be summarised as:
Lean says failure is learning, so as long as we learnt something new, that’s OK…and Agile says we should make smaller decisions, so luckily that failure didn’t take us very far off track!
Applying this alongside the OTG Principles and it’s hard to see how an open/practical/experimental/inclusive/caring/borderless/tech-centric culture would be not be more supported. To my mind, one of the key things is to recognise the failure is happening. If you’re not making value from it, then you’re missing out.
I’m sure that there are things you’ll question or disagree with, please let me know in the comments!
If you’d like to learn more about the #OneTeamGov movement:
- Visit https://www.oneteamgov.uk/
- Join the OTG Slack( there’s a #OneTeamGovWales channel)
- Or follow the movement on Twitter
