Fail Fast is a popular phrase beloved by entrepreneurs and wannabe companies as well as by large serious outfits trying to modify their big corporation DNA.
"Fail fast" or alternatively "fail fast succeed faster" or "fail
forward" or even "fail better" is trying to tell us that it is better to
get customers to experience your product and to learn from their feedback and from your mistakes. These conclusions drive a rapid review and improve phase where you can make the necessary changes. In many cases a worthy message.
The message is that this is preferable to lengthy planning, development and refinement cycles in the office that don't involve the customer. Tirelessly looking for the ultimate product or ideal user experience. In
many ways the idea is very similar to some of the Agile philosophy.
I am a huge believer in meeting the customer early and often and subscribe to much of the logic about doing, learning and improving, but, I have some issues with the fail fast slogan and even with some of the fail fast concept.
Let's deal with the trivial one first. There are many
cases where it just doesn't work, I hope that Boeing and Ford for example
don't embrace fail fast!
However, in a broader sense on any business there
are times when you can't afford to fail, because it ruins the positioning and reputation or because of budget. Let's accept that quick customer
engagement is not an excuse for bad product design and implementation.
Sure work quickly, cut red tape, be passionate about delivery but do the
job right.
Now for my bigger issue, failure means getting it wrong and
messing up. This is never a healthy, positive message it just sets the
wrong tone and is a poisonous attitude to bring to work. It suggests that sloppy poor incompetence is suddenly acceptable. We can do it wrong and fix it in the next development cycle - no problem, nothing happened.
We should remember that "perfection is the enemy of good" (Voltaire) or "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes" (Watson-Watt on Developing Radar during WWII)" These principles mean that we need to do be quick and achieve "enough" or in Agile terms MVP (Minimal Viable Product) so there is often no practical room for the dogged pursuit of perfection. We need to develop something that is at least fit for purpose. But we are not embracing failure as an option - just limited success.
When I googled the phase fail fast I can across a Wikipedia entry
about system resilience. This is a more positive message, we need to
build our product and we need to succeed and survive even if things
aren't quite right.
Let's embrace efficient working practices, early customer
engagement and let our people know that sometimes things do go wrong; so do
your best to prevent this, but we understand and accept that it may happen. It is
unfortunate and undesirable but failure is not our philosophy nor is it our core competence. There
will be no blame game as long as you have tried very hard to succeed.
We are a success orientated company.
Let's just Work Fast and Succeed More
