In this, my second post about my recent re-reading of the Creativity Inc book from Ed Catmull, I want to think about the saying Ed talks about early in the Pixar story – “fail early and fail fast”.
Left to their own devices, most people don’t want to fail. But Andrew Stanton isn’t most people… He’s known about Pixar for repeating the phrases “fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.” He thinks of failure like learning to ride a bike; it isn’t conceivable that you would learn to do this without making mistakes — without toppling over a few times … If you apply this mindset to everything new you attempt, you can begin to subvert the negative connotation associated with making mistakes.
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They think it means accept failure with dignity and move on. The better, more subtle interpretation is that failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy — trying to avoid failure by outthinking it — dooms you to fail.
Ed Catmull talks of the negative perspective of failure, with it being something we learn early as being bad. Rather, Ed wants us to use every failed attempt as a learning opportunity – why did we fail, how did we fail, what can we learn, etc.
Learning about, and from, the ‘failures’ of others, especially where the successes are so well documented and awarded (Pixar has 23 Oscar’s for their efforts) despite the many ‘failures’ on the way to producing some of the most beloved and successful films ever.
From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or — worse! — aren’t smart enough to begin with … This perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned to parrot the oft-repeated arguments about the upside of failure … That early experience of shame is too deep-seated to erase … I see people resist and reject failure and try mightily to avoid it, because regardless of what we say, mistakes feel embarrassing. There is a visceral reaction to failure: It hurts.
We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth … Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality.) And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough … To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.
My experiences in different instances of introducing new technologies or processes, ultimately designed to support or improve the learning design process, have had mixed success. I’m sure this will not be lost on you either. Working out how to keep a to-do list manageable and trying a new tool – did it work, are you still using it? What about trying to reduce the stages required for content approval before you can progress to the build? Do the risk of skipping an approval stage or other important step outweigh the benefits?
How can you know the answer to some of these questions before you try them? You know the answer – you can’t. You have to try it. The earlier you try something, the earlier you’ll find out if it works for you, or not, and whether you continue, try again, or try something else.
In the same way, you can improve the likelihood that a project will succeed by identifying issues early to make adjustments and improvements or bring in extra resources, the ‘fail early, fail fast’ enables adjustments based on the experiences and learning opportunities.
“Fail early, fail fast”.
Image source: David Hopkins