When Failing is the Option

WHEN FAILING IS THE OPTION

I was recently in a worldwide event in Washington and everything seemed to be awesome. More than 500 people were expected to be attending and everything was ready to start.

We were more than 15 guests from all over the world and we were going to talk about Design Thinking and the Methodology that has revolutionized the way that we think about offering products and services to our clients. We all were to point out this topic from different perspectives.

I was the fifth in the guests′ list, so while I was waiting for my turn, I sat down to listen to what the other experts had to say, I realized that we all were talking about different things: we all mentioned Design Thinking but none of us were talking the same language, nor mentioning the same methodology, which has been so extended and known, the one with 5 steps…

But Design Thinking has evolved pretty much ever since it was born, more than 15 years ago. Nowadays, it is a wide “Philosophy” that “is it feed with other many methodologies, techniques and tools.” 

For instance, we do not only have the option of “prototyping”, which is the reason for this article, but I have also discovered that we could have the option of “pretotyping”, which is the art and science of faking it before making it.” And this innovative word was made by the creative people of Google.

Therefore, Design Thinking has gone from having 5 steps into 9 steps. In other words, 4 new parts of a whole must be applied in order to “launch a product” and not to let it be destroyed by the competitors or the consumers. 

Design Thinking has changed from being a simple system of steps into a crazy model that involves many other different processes at a time.

Let us use Prototyping and Pretotyping, which have caught my attention, because of their simplicity and the ease we forget the obvious: failure.

It is said that 90% of the apps do not make any money. Four out of five startups lose investor money, 80% of new restaurants close during their first year…

So, the message is clear; most of the businesses are destined to failure, including our own.

There is a law of Failure: Most of the novelties fail, even if they have a wide, strong business canvas. And seen this from this perspective, failure is not an option, but it is the most feasible result to get.

And this leads me into a question: How could we make it easier or cheaper?

And here, prototyping and pretotyping appear: and we do have 3 ways to fail easily:

1. Do not do anything despite we know that it could happen.

2. Go for it. (Failure)

3. Give ourselves the chance to fail: easy, cheap and often, before the product is launched and the company fails or goes bankrupt.

How does the creator define the word “pretotyping?

Alberto Savoia 

The pretotypes make it possible to gather valuable data in the market and its use to make the decision of risking or not into a new idea. They also establish a fraction of the actual cost of the prototypes in terms of hours or days instead of weeks or months, and cents instead of dollars. Pretotyping helps you to fail and to recover quickly and to free a considerable amount of time, money, energy and enthusiasm to explore new arrangements or ideas until you get to something that people appear to want – the weird and wonderful: this is it!

Definition of pretotyping: To validate the attraction of the market and the potential use of the new product or service, simulating its own experience and minimizing the used resources.

The pretotyping is nurtured by three main principles:

? Data beats opinions

? Doing beats talking

? Simple beats complex

While prototyping, used in Design Thinking, could help to fail faster, sometimes it is not faster enough or cheaper enough. Because the more you invest on it, the less likely is to let it go and admit it was not it.

Who has used the pretotyping?

To start small and see if our idea is accepted?

Facebook / Zuckerberg started like this, with an unfinished product, applied to a micro-community of college people and it was not that bad. They are celebrating their 2 thousand million subscribers nowadays.

Carolina Salazar

CDO/ CCO Design Thinking Institute.

www.designthinking.today / Tel. 55 58 08 16 14