image credit: Joe Loong
To be honest, this post has less to do with failure and more to do with personal innovation from within the corporate structure—the struggle to make change happen, to get your ideas implemented if you aren’t in a senior leadership position.
The Math of Fast and Cheap
In 2007, Doug Hall suggested that businesses should Fail Fast, Fail Cheap when it comes to innovation. Specifically he showed the business sense of failing quickly and cheaply:
If it takes six months and $100,000 to take a product from idea to customer reaction, then at best you’ll get two cycles in a year. However, if you can do a complete cycle of learning in a week for $1,000, you can get 52 cycles in a year at about half the cost.
Actually, if you do the math right, it’s about one-fourth the cost.
In any case, Hall’s point is that you should try new ideas often and on a small scale because you can’t know exactly how an idea will turn out until you try it.
Simply put, this type of rapid iteration that drives innovation. With each iteration you learn, and with each cycle of learning, you get closer to making something work.
What about my career?
Failing fast and cheap is well and good for product development, but what about your career? Consider the following adaptation of three tips to decreasing the cost of failure by Scott Anthony, Managing Director of Innosight Ventures:
Anthony: “Lower the costs of experiments”
Me: Gaining support for your ideas at work may not cost you much money, but it certainly costs you time and effort. To prevent too much of your time from being lost, your first pitch shouldn’t be super polished. It should be “good enough.”
Never blindside your director or CEO with a written action plan, no matter how well researched. Despite your good intentions and solid argumentation, this approach is too easily dismissed. Trust me, it’s happened to me twice in my professional career (you think I’d learn).
The point is to find the sweet spot where your research and verbal pitch are “good enough” to get your foot in the door. Once you’re in, then work on that formal brief. This is will save you oodles of time in the long run.
Anthony: “Change the order of experiments.”
Me: When pitching your ideas, don’t start with your enormous, big idea goal. Instead, start with something smaller. I’d recommend asking yourself, “what simple solution would make others’ jobs easier?”
If you find a way to remove an obstacle your coworkers are presently dealing with, they’ll be more likely to support you when pitch a bigger idea down the road.
Anthony: “Increase the pace of decision making”
Me: One of the most effective ways to sell an idea is to build a prototype. If, however, the prototype isn’t producing some kind of results in relatively short order, consider it may be the idea, not the prototype that’s at fault.
Also consider that the big idea you’ve been pitching for 8 months may not be worth all of the effort you’re putting into it. It doesn’t mean you should abandon your big idea if it isn’t adopted right away, it means you should recognize when a pitch has failed, regroup, shift the order of your experiments, and come back to you big idea later.
This way each cycle of learning can bring you closer to selling your big idea.
What would you add?
When it comes to pitching your ideas at work, how do you decrease the cost of failure?
Please share!
-Andrew
*image only:
image credit: Joe Loong (joelogon on Flickr); original here
