To fail or not to fail

Failing & learning, fast & cheap.

Failure is an essential part of innovation. Innovative solutions improve by trying out something new, experiencing the way it works (or not), observing the reaction of potential customers and adapting.

Corporations immediately see waste here.  This can be addressed, as I mentioned in my “Passion” blog, with a simple innovation framework: 1. focused creativity, 2. quick experimentation, 3. structured testing.

I’ll elaborate here on my experience with phase 2, quick experimentation. This is the optimal phase to fail fast, as it still can be done cheaply. 

 First, I recommend to define a few assumptions: 2-4 key likely reasons why this innovation could work.

• Example: A vaccine marketer had a brand differentiation challenge. He knew that his pediatrician customers also had a challenge: crying, needle fearing children that needed vaccination.  He identified a dental vibrating tool developed for painless dental injections and assumed this tool could be a solution for painless vaccination. If connected to his vaccine brand, it could provide valuable differentiation. Two key assumptions were that pediatricians would be able to use the tool and that children would no longer be scared.

Then, the innovator tests the assumptions qualitatively.

• The above innovator bought a few of the vibrating dental tools, the “prototypes”, gave them to a few pediatricians and observed the reaction of the physicians, the children and their parents.

If the experiment confirms the assumptions, the innovator can move on to a full pilot. If the experiment fails to confirm most of the assumptions, it’s time to stop and declare failure. If only one assumption fails, it may be worth to adapt the experiment a bit and try again. If too many assumptions fail, it may take too much energy to fix the experiment and be better to start over. 

• In our example, unexpectedly and unfortunately, the children cried even more. They cried before they saw/felt the needle, as they were scared by the noise of the approaching vibrating tool. Failure. Good failure.

This experiment failed cheaply and quickly.  No time was spend yet on creating a full business case, develop an ROI, get legal approvals, define manufacturing costs, negotiate compliance implications.  Innovators can easily try multiple of these experiments, until one works.

As Thomas Edison said:

“I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”

So, as Innovation Leader, I guided innovators on how to do a quick experiment. This helped innovators to learn fast and/or fail fast, avoiding that they passionately jumped immediately in an expensive, time consuming, structured pilot.  If a failure did occur,  I also made sure it was celebrated, so others could learn from it and see that “good” failure is accepted in the corporation. 

More reading on this:  Why the ability to fail leads to innovation  

What are your thoughts? Please share below!