The Value of Failing
People like to talk about failing, but is there really value in it? Failure is a crucial part of our process, it’s where we learn the most and where we end up with our biggest successes.
Here is The WARP Guide to: Failure.
Failure is only daunting when you’ve got a lot to lose.
Start-ups are lucky. They don’t have the corporate requirements and reporting structures that confine them or limit their ability to take risk. This gives them the flexibility to be innovative, to push boundaries, and yes, to fail.
Fail is such a negative word. At WEAREREASONABLEPEOPLE we don’t fail. We learn. We fuck up sometimes, absolutely, we’re not robots. But when we recognize our mistakes, we pick up, we admit to them, and we move forward, with more information than we had before our fail.. The faster we pick ourselves up, the more successful we become.
So how can you fail gracefully?
1. Measure the risk. Is this a client, project, situation that can afford the risk? Or will you risk more by not attempting to fail?
Google is a great example of a company that continues to take risks, profitable risks. They take a big problem (like making wind energy 10x more efficient and reliable), come up with an unorthodox solution (such as taking advantage of high winds with kites) and try to kill the project by proving prove that if will fail (hasn’t failed yet). See Makani Kites.
2. Give yourself permission to make mistakes.
Make sure the team knows they are ALLOWED to make mistakes. Tell them to report their mistakes right away so that solutions can be found. This is a sure way to mitigate risk and to keep from costly mistakes.
3. Test the value of your idea before sinking money into it.
You’ve heard it before, but ASK your potential customers before you get started.
4. Prototype the idea before sinking money into building it.
By building you a prototype you’ll know your project’s chance of success before you start the expensive software development phase (with project managers, architects, consultants and expensive developers). This way you create value by avoiding to waste a lot of money in the future.
5. There is such a thing as a good fail and a bad fail.
A bad failure is when it takes a long time to realize you’ve failed. When you didn’t prepare or plan or understand the risk, usually bad failures are very expensive and hard to bounce back from. Good failures are recognized quickly, are mitigated and are have come out of proper planning. Measure twice, cut once. The other way around and you’re spending twice the cost.
“Failure is the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely.” — Henry Ford
We are happy to help our clients mitigate risk by letting us fail for them. We push our clients to focus on “pre-production” first, through discovery and service design workshops (see our WARP Guide to Service Design) in order to test their value proposition and to save money. Then, we like to prototype, to iterate and then to implement.
