Spend enough time reading leadership and business articles and you’re bound to come across the mantra, “Fail fast. Fail often. Fail forward.” However, what started as a high-tech mainstay encouraging iteration has become a misunderstood maxim. Looking beyond the meme-sized quote of this advice, understanding its nuance, and applying it with wisdom is the secret of success.
Hear the phrase often enough, and it can start to feel like start-ups and growing businesses are aiming at failure as a step to success. Let’s be clear: failure is not the goal. When you set out to test a new idea or venture, your goal isn’t to get it wrong out of the gate. Your goal is to succeed.
You’re moving out into the world with a product or service that you think can meet the felt need of a target market you’ve identified. Your aim is to produce this product and have it sell, make an impact, and sell some more. That’s the goal.
The reality is that sometimes you’re going to strike gold on the first swing. And sometimes, you’re going to find pyrite, and that’s okay. Failure may not be the goal, but it’s also not the finite end.
Just as much as we misunderstand the concept of failing fast and often, we can also get caught up in the myth of overnight success. Here’s this new phenomenon on the scene that seems to have come out of nowhere. From our vantage point, the company and its offerings hit the ground running in dominating form. It’s the sort of story that hits us in the inspirational feels and gets us excited about the ideas percolating in our own inventive minds. It’s the fairy tale of instant success.
We all see Cinderella showing up in the gown with the glass slippers, taking the ball by storm. What we ignore is the many years before it that she toiled in rags, sleeves rolled up, hard at work. That startup that turns the industry on its head didn’t just show up with an out-of-the-gate hit. They worked for it.
They had an idea. They built a model of it. They beta tested. They adjusted. They tried again. They tweaked it some more. They studied their market. They made some more adjustments. They took a leap of faith going public knowing they may have to adjust and amend some more once they had real market experience.
The real goal isn’t failure. It’s what we do with it. If we fail, get up, dust ourselves off, and then throw some other random idea against the wall to see if it sticks, we’re just hoping for luck. Luck isn’t a recipe for long-term success. This is the difference between an educated guess and a wild hunch. Success starts with the former.
We want to do our homework. Understand our market. Have an idea of what the pain points are and how we might ease them with the product or service we’re developing. We want to have a plan based on actual data and knowledge. Then we build and test. This is where iteration comes in.
We generate an initial concept model. We test it. We identify what parts of it work and what doesn’t. We edit. We amend. We try again. We tweak again. We try again. We keep improving the concept until it’s ready for market and then we go forward, ready to amend and improve with subsequent updates.
Yes, we can learn and grow from failure. We can also learn and grow from success. From Edison’s ability to reframe (“I have not failed, I just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” ) to the “fail fast” mantra, the real message is that we need to be willing to take a risk and try a thing.
Whether it’s a personal goal or a professional one, whether it’s a new business you want to launch or a new initiative you want to undertake at an established company, you need to accept the risk of failure. You need to be prepared to falter, then study what worked and what went wrong. You need to be willing to adapt and amend. To learn from the attempt and grow from it.
Sometimes the lesson is, “This idea simply isn’t viable and I’m going to walk away now before I waste more time and resources on trying to force it to work.” Sometimes the lesson is, “A few more adjustments and this may actually take off!” The key to success is learning to grow and adapt – not to fail. It’s learning to experiment and to use your findings to propel forward.
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