Don’t fail fast. Learn fast!

“Fail fast.”

Are you tired of this cliché? I know my teams often are. I’ve seen eyes roll when I use this popular phrase, and it’s easy see why. After all, “fail fast” is one of those semi-meaningless phrases some managers love and repeat as a mantra.

Turn the phrase around, though, and watch those eye rolls become smiling eyes.

Don’t encourage your team to fail fast. Encourage them to learn fast.

Any team should be encouraged to take on experiments, try new ideas, innovate in their space. We want to encourage them to get outside of their comfort zones and work with innovation always on their minds.

We want to encourage our teams to learn.

When they try something new, when they learn, a new set of options opens up. They may not be able to embrace all the ideas they’ve explored, but they probably can embrace some – and sometimes those ideas open the door to new ideas. Better to have a vast panoply of options than just one or two options which follow traditional, antiquated thinking.

It’s not a failure when an experiment doesn’t bear fruit in the way you hoped it would. After all, the team took the initiative – and the risk – to try something new. They gave the experiment a sincere try. In the process the team learned more about their technologies, about themselves and about their teammates. As the Agile manifesto declares, we favor responding to change over following a plan.

A few years back, one of my teams used their failure to drive innovation inside our company. My team was excited to create a continuous deployment system which could deliver small website updates on a frequent cadence. But the team struggled creating their CD pipeline. They learned fast that our legacy system was underpowered and under-tooled for their needs.

The team’s report about their learning triggered me to have conversations with my peer Scrum Masters around root causes. In turn, those conversations triggered chats with management to add an Initiative to drive implementation of a CD pipeline company-wide, and have my team be pilot adopters. Our “failure” led to learning, which lead to a well-considered upgrade.

Continuous learning is also a key to a positive mindset. A team member who is learning is frequently brings new ideas to their team. The learner is then perceived as a leader. The learner doesn’t have to overcome the negative attitude of embracing failure. Instead, the learner embraces the positive mentality of learning. They understand the power of one person learning. They understand one person can help an entire organization grow.

Consider the contrasting effect on individuals and their ambitions when you shift the emphasis from failure to learning. People no longer are forced in their reviews to explain why something failed. Instead, they are freed to embrace innovation. Those with the greatest imagination tend to be the ones leading teams. They are always learning and never letting an obstacle get them down. Continuous learning leads to a positive mindset and thus leads to virtuous cycles.

For us Agilists, those virtuous cycles map nicely to the Agile principles and to self-organized teams. When you give your team members the space to grow and learn, you can achieve goals beyond what you could have imagined.

“Failing fast” is a noble idea and makes a lot of sense. But don’t be negative! Encourage your teams to learn fast. If you do, you’ll be delighted with the results.