The Idea in Brief
If you’re launching a new business, creating a new product, or developing a new technology, the principles of intelligent failure provide both logic and a safety net.
Decide what you’re trying to do and what success would look like.
Be explicit about the assumptions you’re making and have a plan for testing them throughout the project.
Design the initiative in small chunks so that you learn fast, without spending too much money. Don’t try to learn more than one significant thing at a time.
Create a culture that shares, forgives, and sometimes even celebrates failure.
It’s hardly news that business leaders work in increasingly uncertain environments. Nor will it surprise anyone that under uncertain conditions, failures are more common than successes. And yet, strangely, we don’t design organizations to manage, mitigate, and learn from failures. When I ask executives how effective their organizations are at learning from failure, on a scale of one to 10, I often get a sheepish “Two—or maybe three” in response. As this suggests, most organizations are profoundly biased against failure and make no systematic effort to study it. Executives hide mistakes or pretend they were always part of the master plan. Failures become undiscussable, and people grow so afraid of hurting their career prospects that they eventually stop taking risks.
