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Failure is quite the buzzword at the moment. Especially here in San Francisco; a city where so many people are trying something new. With all these attempts at success, it’s hardly surprising that many creative concepts bottom out. And alongside these minor blips, chronic malfunctions, and major collapses, a new narrative of failure has taken shape. FailCon is a conference that invites people to reflect on their implosions. Since its inception in San Francisco in 2009, it has now grown to take place in around six cities around the world each year (and the irony of a conference about failure becoming a massive success is not lost on us!).
So, given that it’s almost inevitable that we’ll all face setbacks in our work and personal projects, what are the best strategies to ensure that we fail better?
Know When to Pivot
Sometimes a great idea just needs to be sent in a different direction. If you are failing with one version of your project, it might be worth thinking about changing course a bit. Keep hold of your core aims but consider whether a slightly different approach would yield better results. Before Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger came up with Nupedia. The aim of the site was to invite scholars and experts to create encyclopedic content. It was a disaster. The process of commissioning, editing, fact-checking, and formatting each submission meant that by the end of the gestation period, there were a total of 20 finished articles online. So the founders pivoted. They didn’t change the basis of the idea and they maintained communication with their members but, crucially, they turned the site into a wiki. This allowed the wider community of readers and users to both create and edit content. Wikipedia was born. Don’t underestimate the ways in which a shift in process can turn a flailing venture into a concept that flourishes.
Stay in Beta
Regardless of whether your project is tech related, it's useful to consider the value of remaining in beta mode for a while. Do you really need to release a ‘perfect’ entity to your audience? Or could you deliver something that is a work in progress and then use feedback to refine it? How about viewing each failure as practice? Google is famous for keeping Gmail in beta status from its launch in 2004 until 2009. The company recognized that even if a few features were missing in the early stages, it still had a value as a useable product. And, there might even be a benefit to this approach; Google Research Director Peter Norvig explained that “it gives the impression that Google is always changing.” Additionally, by communicating that your project is still in flux, you are building a culture of honesty which, in turn, may make your users more sensitive to any failures along the way.
Tear off the Band-Aid
Fail quickly. It sounds like an empty platitude but actually it is an important concept. If something clearly isn’t working, it’s often better to just shelve it immediately and try something new. And by the same philosophy, if your idea is failing, why not try a few different quick responses. By being open to quickfire iterations, you may find that you stumble on a lasting solution. AirBnB is one example of a company that has responded successfully to some of its failures. In its very early stages, the requirement was that all postings offered an airbed and breakfast. It didn’t do well (for a while, there were just two users of the site ... and one was a founder). In the face of their struggles, they tried loosening the requirement of an airbed and allowed people to post about spare rooms or whole apartments. Things started to improve. Then they removed the necessity for breakfast to be served and the site became even more popular. Each iteration brought greater momentum. Now the company has a policy of showing all new recruits how to quickly and easily test new models for user engagement. And anything that fails can be removed just as speedily.
Don’t Be Precious
You know that feeling where you have an idea and you are convinced it’s brilliant and will change the world? And then you start telling people or you develop a prototype or you do some market research and it turns out that no one else agrees? Ninety-nine times out of 100 it’s failed for a reason. It may be humiliating, embarrassing, and painful to accept failure but the real skill is in moving on. It’s very easy to be defensive or to go into a state of denial, but really the best tactic is to develop resilience. In an interview with Kathryn Schulz, Ira Glass spoke compellingly about the importance of allowing for failure and accepting it with grace. In the development of content for This American Life, he recounted how “it's not unusual for us to go through 25 or 30 ideas and then go into production on eight or 10 and then kill everything but three or four.” Over time, he’s learned to let go of failing ideas rather than persevere and end up with something of poor quality. In his words: “I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it's usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it.”