How We Innovate by Embracing Failure with The Sword of Enlightenment
As human beings, we fear failure. We’ve been brought up at home and taught at school that success is always the intended outcome. But this focus on success is self-contradictory; if we always had reached the intended outcome, we would have hardly learned anything new and would have never become the interesting human beings we are today.
It’s a shame that failure has a bad name. When experiments are at the core of innovation, we shouldn’t be afraid to fail, we should be afraid of not trying. This article is about how we try to embrace failure in order to learn from it rather than see it as a negative construct.
Dare to fail and embrace failure
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly
— Robert F. Kennedy
At ING Wholesale Banking Advanced Analytics (ING WBAA) we try to create the right working culture, to embrace failure by creating a safe space where people dare to fail and where we share our failures and learnings as much as possible.
The faster we fail the quicker we learn. The speed at which we experiment is our only constraint but taking time to reflect on our failures is a crucial part. In the end, our failures are the building blocks for our successes.
Design-led
We are a design-led Tribe and our design maturity is something to be proud of. We adopt several pieces from known and lesser-known frameworks within the bank to get things done. We use ING’s way of innovation, called PACE, an aggregate of Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Scrum. We experiment with Pretendotyping, Corporate Jamming, Shape Up and explore things like Blitzscaling.
But all these things shape our modus operandi it causes confusion, especially if these frameworks are new to members of the Tribe or if they had joined the workforce recently. That’s why we created something that makes the overarching goal a lot simpler and helps us focus on the right things.
We call this the Path of Certainty and Growth.
The Path and The Sword
The Path is a metaphor for the way we work and The Sword is an actual sword that we use to embrace failures. We use these metaphors because they have a way of holding the most explanation in the least space.
The Path
The Path is really simple. To build the right product, we ensure that everything we do results in increasing certainty. We adopt the riskiest assumption for our processes, borrowed from Lean Startup, by testing all our assumptions with the question “How do you know?”.
A lot of assumptions live in items like;
- Business model canvas
- Value proposition canvas
- Machine learning model
- Data availability and consistency
- Customer value on backlogs
- Many more..
We could put down revenue streams on a business model canvas but how do we know we are going to get revenue in this way? How do we know what our customer segments are? How do we know if a machine learning model is accurate enough?
After asking the simple “How do you know?” question the next step is to find a way to find the right answer as cheaply as possible. This is where design creativity thrives! The simplest way of finding the answers can be through interviews, Mechanical Turks, guerilla testing, pretendotypes, sketches.. Making this simple, amazingly simple, is what characterises design craftsmanship.
The above graph illustrates the cheapest way of growing our products. It’s the balance between knowing and investing. As soon as our certainty grows, we can invest more in our product and build fidelity.
The blue arrows represent iterating over new assumptions and adjusting our path to more certainty. The first blue arrow could mean something like a story frame. By just writing text, we write down the story of the problem we are trying to solve and validate that with users. Testing how this reflects on users enables us to gain certainty. If the story does not resonate with them, we iterate by rewriting it. Agile, cheap and quick. When experiments like this happen often and in increments, you naturally get more comfortable with failure.
If we’ve got a story that our users can relate to, we proceed to test the next assumption, at which point we can invest more, because we’ve already gained some confidence. A next step (second blue arrow) could be just a simple sketch based on our validated story. It will cost a little bit more effort but it will give us even more certainty for going in the right direction. And so on…
Where it goes wrong, point A & B
Within engineering-heavy cultures, we tend to start building stuff asap. That’s what we’re good at as we don’t like uncertainty and being told wrong. This is where point A lives, we spend a lot of time and effort into building something with a limited set of validated assumptions and certainty.
Another problem arises from the other end of the spectrum when people get too confident about their idea (point B) where most of the time, not enough bias is taken into account, a lack of validation. This is also the point where proper research comes into play. To understand how consumers think and feel, it is vital to go beyond words. Hours of research can cut months of engineering. This is the reason why we invest heavily in research.
The Sword
Contrary to The Path — being not more than an image — The Sword is actual, a physical sword which we actually use. When we start investing more and more there is still a chance that new insights will cause us to stop chasing a new idea. We want to arrive at this point as soon as possible (fail fast) but sometimes it can take more effort to validate. For example, it can take a couple of weeks to validate the feasibility of an analytics model. The investment was probably worth a big enough problem, but it can still feel like a loss.
In a corporate environment, it is usually not so easy to experiment and fail because failing is not inherent in the current DNA. If the investment is big and we fail, this is where we embrace our failures by using the Sword Of Enlightenment. That’s why we make it explicit with a ceremony so we can also have a conversation with others. Just after working hours, we sabre a cheap bottle of champagne and the Ceremony starts.
The Ceremony
As stated before, failing is awesome. The only way we learn and get enlightened is through our mistakes. We start the ceremony by enlightening ourselves and each other by reading out loud the things we’ve learned in the four categories ‘For next time’, ‘Never again’, ‘What worked for us’ and ‘Surprises’. Indeed, kinda like a Scrum retro. After this, the person with the Sword swears an oath to keep on failing while working for WBAA and sabres the bottle. Most of us take a nip of the champagne (while checking if there are any pieces of glass left) and have a talk about the things we learned.
Resumé
Failing is vital for innovation. It’s easy to talk about failure but much harder to incorporate it into a way of working in practice and have everyone in the team adopt it in their daily work. Therefore we embrace failing by making it tangible and easy to understand through analogies. We use the Path of Certainty and Growth and The Sword of Enlightenment to make failing tangible, explicit and open to discussion.
How do you embrace failure?
Links
https://evannex.com/blogs/news/elon-musk-is-a-failure
Google’s re:work template for a postmortem exercise
Couldn’t have done it without
Rafah, Parisa & Nicole
