succeeding to fail

“Failure” is a popular word these days, especially in business/entrepreneur circles. “Fail early and often” is heard a lot – and even sometimes from me but in our case I’m talking about prototype design and testing. From a buzzword perspective, failure is the darling of the biz cognoscenti because, of course, we learn from failure and then we’ll get even better. There are a couple of problems though. First off, it often is lip service, because failure is in fact expensive and at the end of the day, turns out people don’t want to pay for it. Secondly, and perhaps more insidious, is the believe that failure is the opposite of success. So if we fail, we “learn” and then will get closer to success.

Well, maybe. But the either/or proposition misses the point. Failure isn’t the opposite of success. Rather, failure provides you the opportunity to question success. More directly, failure brings into question the parameters that determine success. One has to be very careful not to go down the slippery slope of changing metrics after the fact and then declaring victory. The real challenges in failure are being able to accept the hit to the ego (if you’re invested in what you’re doing, your ego will come for the ride), and then thinking deeply about whether or not what defines success actually is correct. Sometimes the “obvious” metrics aren’t in fact correct, and you have to think more about 2nd/3rd order effects. Easy problems have easy metrics. Hard problems…half the battle is figuring out the metrics. Coming up with answers is really about figuring out the real questions.