On Failing Faster

Entrepreneurs and venture capital investors know all about failing fast: They invest. They pause to see if the business takes off. If not, they pull out, cut their losses, and move on.

Here we consider a different kind of fast failure, and how it can transform your leadership.

Art and Fear, a book by David Bayles and Ted Orland, includes a true story of a ceramics teacher who tried an experiment. He divided his the class in two and told the first half that they would be graded solely on the quantity of pottery produced during the semester—the more clay they used, the higher the grade. The second half of the class was informed that their entire semester's grade would be based on quality only. In fact, their semester grade would come down to the quality of their single finest piece of pottery.

"When the end of the quarter arrived and it came to grading time, the instructor made an interesting discovery: the students who created the best work, as judged by technical and artistic sophistication, were the quantity group. While they were busy producing pot after pot, they were experimenting, becoming more adept at working with the clay, and learning from the mistakes on each progressive piece."

The students who used more clay were less attached to any one piece 'succeeding'. By creating lots of pottery, they were honing their skills, trying new approaches, venturing, playing—became really good potters in the process.

There's a lesson in here for all of us—what stops us from "going for it” like those prolific potters? If you're like most people, you have internalized the quality potter's approach: make fewer attempts, try like the dickens to 'get it right'— no—PERFECT. Most of us tend to try to do our best work every time, avoiding screw ups and mediocre outcomes. It is exactly those tendencies which cause...mediocre outcomes!

What if you were to resolve to fail faster? Throw ideas out, try stuff, then try it again a different way. See what sticks, instead of working so hard to make sure every project, every endeavor is successful. What if you gave your team permission to swing wider, and fail more frequently? What if you talked about those failures, NOT from a place of blame, but purely from a learning perspective? Imagine how good your team would get over time!

Try taking a look at your relationship to failure. Are you playing it safe, trying to 'get it perfect' every time? Is there a part of you that wants to look good—that measures YOU by how you or your team did on your latest clay pot? See if you can make many pots, and learn from each of them. What works? What doesn’t? Play with MORE CLAY!