Natural selection, along with the associated biological machinery, is the most durable innovation engine that I can think of. It’s been running for approximately 3.5 billion years. And it’s produced the 1 to 2 million species in existence today. In spite of this success, only about one species in one thousand that has existed still exists today. Natural selection has a batting average of 0.001. If their continued existence is the metric, then nine hundred ninety nine species failed.
Try
Failure is what happens when we try but do not achieve a desired and anticipated outcome because of one or more factors we didn’t properly account for. We might not have known about the troublesome factor. We might have known about it but didn’t anticipate the magnitude of its effect. We might even be trying to use failure as a mechanism to probe and identify the factor. In any case, it took us out!
There’s an old adage that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting a different outcome. This is insanity, despite the prevalence of this kind of thinking in business and life.
Fail
In any event, failure has a bad rep. The problem is, in the process of trying and failing we inevitably leave ourselves in a compromising position. That’s because we thought we were going to end up a point A. Unfortunately, we landed some distance away, at point B. Sometimes point B is lying flat on our face on the kitchen floor. Failure can hurt. Failure can kill.
The psychology is complex. Because of a few bad experiences with point B, we instinctively shy away from situations that might lead to failure, especially when we can visualize point B (falling on our face, being turned down for a date, hitting the ground after our parachute doesn’t open) in our mind. And we gauge the likelihood of failure by how many of these scenarios we can imagine. And then we make decisions (to invest, to launch, to propose, to hire).
The process doesn’t sound very precise, does it?
Embrace
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to explore new territory and avoid failure at the same time. It doesn’t even make sense. We’re going to do something we’ve never done. We’re going to go somewhere we’ve never been. Oh, and we’re going to make it happen without a setback. This is madness, despite the prevalence of this kind of thinking in business and life.
Because it’s so hard (impossible) to craft a strategy that guarantees we’ll avoid failure and because it’s so hard (impossible) to adequately measure unknown factors, the best strategies plan for failure.
The specific methodology isn’t about trying to fail; it’s about trying to get the inevitable failures out of the system quickly. And surviving long enough for that to happen.
How does it work? I’ll talk about it next.
- Bandit
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