You’ve probably heard about Fail Forward as one of the ways to reshape your culture for more innovation (take this list for example). I’m not buying it though.
I’ve been starting to doubt it for a couple of months. It’s such a mainstay of innovation thinking, but I’m starting to seriously question it for the following reasons.
It is often couched as ‘follow your dreams, just make sure you don’t spend too long on it if it’s a bad idea’ which actually sounds irresponsible to me. I don’t think people should run with any random project, idea or pipedream. Use consumer research to find unmet needs or brainstorm 100s of ideas and filter them down by potential and desirability.
If you look at the case studies in Lean Startup (I’m a fan) and the notion of pivoting, they didn’t just fail and move on, they kept working on their product. Instead of seeing setbacks as failing they pivoted their product concept at the appropriate level, based on what they learn through experiments and iterations.
Nobody wants to admit failure, especially not at work. It might sound good when you think of it for other people but when are you personally OK about saying you’re a failure and that you failed? We can be more honest about what we’ve truly succeeded at, but I’m really skeptical about anyone ever getting comfortable with calling themselves a failure.
Incentivizing failure is a bad idea! I’ve yet to hear an effective way to incentivize the ‘fail forward’ approach.
The only time in the innovation work I’ve been doing at Gannett when we do something akin to failing forward is during early concept testing, a small moment in the overall process when we want to sift through many ideas quickly and learn from the ones we’re shelving.
Recently I heard someone say ‘having innovation in your job title dooms you to failure, because people’s expectations will always be unrealistically high’. I feel similarly about this: Anyone who tries to convince their organization that they need to ‘fail forward’ is doomed in their efforts for the above reasons. I think we’re better off skipping this one and focusing on better ideas for growing a culture of innovation.
