Fail Better

Failure's inevitability could be a good thing.

Unpredictability make life and work interesting by adding an element of suspense and raising the stakes, which in turn drives engagement and enables meaning. It allows discovery, surprises and novel solutions to emerge.

Under the right circumstances for learning, the experience of failure sparks new rounds of problem solving, unleashing innovation and creativity. People think more deeply when wrestling to explain failed results than when accounting for their successes.

New efforts fail for many reasons. Some are smart failures that end up saving resources or delivering better solutions. These are the failures we seek to enable. Others are the product of random unpredictable forces. These failures need to be tolerated and managed. Unfortunately, some failures are just plain dumb.  Such failures need to be avoided. If they do occur, you need to call them out, or run the risk of encouraging poor performance.

In "FAIL BETTER: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner," Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn argue that the right kind of failure: small-scale, reversible, informative, linked to broader goals, and designed to illuminate key issues--paves the way to success. They have developed the "fail better" approach which creates the conditions, culture and habits to systematically, ruthlessly and quickly figure out what works.

Applicable to teams, entrepreneurs, executives and managers--FAIL BETTER shows how to benefit from failure to launch better businesses, develop new products or even change the world.

Source: Anjali Sastry: Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner

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 More at The Gift of Failure: https://www.coachingtip.com/2013/11/the-gift-of-failure.html