Forgive the hot take here… and while I don’t profess to own the answers on this one, I’d like to share what some might feel is a bit of a provocative idea.  So here goes.

Is fail fast bad?

I’ve recently been exploring innovation; fail fast is one of the approaches.  The benefits of fail fast are very well touted (and for the sake of clarity on this post, I’m not arguing against benefits).  But what about the costs?  It is the human costs in particular, that I question most,

So rather than approach this directly, let’s start with a few places where we don’t apply fail fast to help paint the picture and I’ll invite you to ask yourself to consider if we should?

  • Youth Sport.  For those of you that have recently experienced the joy of youth sports (me being one them), you well know the journey is so much of the experience.
  • Education.  A part of learning is about the process of learning.  If we already knew it, we would not need to learn it.  If we limited our education to only what we quickly understood, it would be hard to imagine what the world would look like.
  • Religion. This is classic.  Many who practice a religion don’t profess to have the answers, and yet religion persists. (To be clear, I’m not advocating here, just sharing observation.)
  • Government.  Sure, let’s try something, and eventually if we still don’t like it let’s simply throw it out and try another thing to eventually land on what exactly?
  • Institutions.  We have plenty of them.  I recently had a discussion where someone shared what I thought was a very astute observation – it is much easier to tear things down as opposed to building them up.

All the above play in the world of innovation in many shapes and forms.  All of the above change over time.  But I’m not sure we’d blindly apply fail fast to any of them.

As I’ve been trying to crystalize my thinking here, I think I’ve boiled it down to the following two core issues related to fail fast – both of which are decidedly human:

1)      A lack of upfront ambition on behalf of the maker.

2)      A lack of empathy for the markets these efforts are trying to serve.

Regarding ambition, we’re going to try to make something that is only so good?  If we find a market for it great.  And if not, we call it a fail, and then simply throw it out, and MVP a new feature and test?  This feels perhaps a bit shallow.  Is our purpose simply to get out of bed and make something good enough and hope that there is just enough (paying) audience out there to justify getting out of bed the next day?  I certainly hope not.

From an audience perspective (and yes, the audience is people), are we really looking to make simply to be just good enough for just enough market?  And if we make and there is not enough audience, do we simply walk away from the audience, the relationships already built?  Is this a healthy way to feel about audience?  Perhaps, I’m missing it, but where is the human?

And of course, all the waste.  Wasted effort.  Wasted time.  Wasted ambition.  Wasted joy.  And where does all this waste, this failure go?  Well of course it goes into the trash, and with it perhaps all the people that failed fast along the way.  And are we supposed to feel that is good?  Good that we failed fast and made it to the trash heap that much quicker?

Is the goal to create less trash, or more goodness?

I can recall from my days in Hollywood, an industry famous for failure, people don’t pitch with blinders on – everyone knows how hard it is to find success.  And not once did I ever connect with a writer or a pitch a concept that embraced this concept of let’s get it out there and maybe, just maybe its not a great idea, and maybe just maybe we can convince someone to buy it, and then convince someone else to air it, and finally we can convince an audience to possibly look at it, and we’ll see if it there is something to it, and if not, well no big deal, we will simply consider it a failure and move on.

And yes, I get that some things will fail.  Of course they will.  In fact, if we’re being honest, most ideas and innovations will fail.

Perhaps it is the fail fast mindset I’m questioning….

Or maybe it is as simple as being reluctant to celebrate the word fail…

Curious to hear what you think.

Image generated by AI (Google Imagen 3).