If you cannot fail then you cannot succeed either

We want to plan for success, not failure. The best plan is one which makes failure vanishingly unlikely. However, if failure is not only unlikely but conceptually impossible, then something has gone wrong. If it is impossible to fail, then any so-called "success" is meaningless.

SMART objectives

At school we learn that goals should be "SMART": specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. These criteria increase the likelihood of success by clarifying what constitutes success and what constitutes failure.

At the other end of the spectrum, the worst kinds of objectives are those which are so vague that you can declare victory regardless of the facts. I am not alone in having seen many instances where a project or timeframe ended and then, after the fact, people started thinking about how to evaluate the success of what had just happened.

In that situation you can cherry-pick the data that paints you in a favourable light. If you want to undermine someone then likewise you cherry-pick the data that makes them look bad. They can't defend themselves in any legitimate way if they haven't been operating by clear standards. But defend themselves they will. The whole thing descends into crude politicking.

Failing at "failing fast"

When I was in the public service it became fashionable to talk about "failing fast". Of course nobody ever actually failed. It was just something you said, because it was fashionable. The closest I came to seeing a project "fail fast" was when an executive borrowed a dozen staff from different teams to work on a software project, scraped together leftover money to pay for some consultants, and then after six months of work went to the organisation's IT department to get their support for the next phase of the project.

This was of course the first time that the IT department had even heard of the project. So what happened? I'm not entirely sure. The borrowed staff went back to their old jobs. The project neither failed nor succeeded. It was simply never spoken of again. Somewhere in the archives there is probably a project status report that explains that the project met all of its objectives and was closed successfully.

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What could we have learned from that project? Probably a lot. But it was never spoken of again, except in whispers, as a warning about the dangers of IT projects.

This was a lost opportunity. The executive didn't do all that just for fun. He was trying to solve a real problem. A hard problem that others were scared to even touch. How can an organisation build progressively towards solutions to hard problems, if failure along the way has to be hidden away and defined out of existence?

Overarching objectives, and a higher purpose

The essential context here is the problem that we are trying to solve. When we set objectives for some undertaking, we are trying to achieve another set of objectives, a higher purpose.

Therefore it is entirely legitimate for a project to find itself on the brink of failure, and then succeed by completely changing its objectives. That is very different from making up excuses after the fact to redefine failure as success.

The key is to keep one eye on that higher purpose. If a project's objectives are conceptually sound, embrace the possibility of failure, and are directed at a higher purpose, then it becomes possible to modify them in response to a crisis -- without becoming completely divorced from the underlying essence of what the project is trying to achieve and why.

After all, no project is an end in itself. The objectives of this project are a means to achieving some overarching objective, which itself is a means to a yet-more-overarching objective, all the way up to the basic profit motive of the company, the public interest, the deep philosophical question of "the good life", etc.

Learning from failure

Failure is essential to learning. If all of your projects are successful, then you learn what works and keep doing it. But if all of your projects are successful only in the frivolous sense that you wrote a status report saying they were successful, then what have you learned?

Perhaps, if your "higher purpose" was to milk your organisation's treasury for a lengthy career, then you are definitely learning something about how to do that. However, for more idealistic readers, the expectation will be that the organisation experiences failure and learns from it.

The only way you can learn from failure is if you know squarely what you failed at and how. That gives you an important clue about how to do things differently next time. Which is to say you learned something, not just in the abstract, but that is relevant to action.

Therefore I say that objectives should not just be SMART, they should be failure-oriented. That is of course implicit in the original "SMART" formulation, but it is important to re-state it today. The goal is to either succeed, or fail in a way that teaches you how to succeed next time.

The goal is to either succeed, or fail in a way that teaches you how to succeed next time.

The basic problem

In George T Doran's 1981 paper which introduced the "SMART" formulation, he recognised that writing objectives was "a difficult task... that generates much stress.... [Managers] usually don't want to take time to put something on paper that they feel will commit them to a situation in which they may or may not have control over the variables."

Whatever fashionable jargon we're using to talk about planning this year or next, this is a basic problem we have to confront: in many organisations, the better you are at writing objectives, the more stress you are put under.

It is the old "bikeshed" principle: people will spend inordinate amounts of time talking about things that are easy to talk about, not things that are important. If there are five people setting objectives for the year, and four of them write wishy-washy objectives, and one of them writes good objectives, who do you think is going to get the scrutiny at the end of the year?

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This is why it is so important to emphasise failure when designing objectives. The scrutiny should fall first on the four with the poor objectives, so that they can have clearer direction for the year. We need to make it easier for people to push back against wishy-washy objectives than it is to pretend to talk about them.

A path forward

A simple starting point is this: if your objectives do not permit failure, then you have already failed.

If your objectives do not permit failure, then you have already failed.

Writing and revising objectives must become "a way of life" (again quoting Doran's 1981 paper). Not just writing objectives, but revising them as well. In every healthy organisation, it is normal to revise objectives as new facts emerge. If no new facts emerge, that means either you had perfect knowledge to start with, or (more likely) you have your blinkers on.

Excellence does not lie in continuous satisfaction of low standards, artificial metrics or vague objectives. Excellence lies in continuous pursuit and revision of ambitious objectives, always embracing the possibility of failure, and always aligned with a higher purpose. Ultimately, excellence is measured against that higher purpose. Failure along the way is normal, and what matters is what we learn from it.