Why Failing Fast Wastes Time and Learning Quickly Gets Results

This week I'm putting the finishing touches to a six-month leadership programme with an Asia-based market leader in manufacturing. A small Kiwi business, based entirely remotely, working with a global market leader. The amount of learning I've done over the last three years to reach this point is enormous.

Whilst my team and I were discussing the kick-off workshop, I was emailed a summary of the book in my newsletter this week: Fail Fast. Fail Often by Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz. They are psychologists, career counsellors, and creators of the popular Stanford University course "Fail Fast, Fail Often."

I had a scan read and found myself fundamentally disagreeing with the title, because the core principles inside are far more positive than it suggests. That's not to say it's a bad book. It isn't. The Stanford course has been well known for a while. But the language of failure tends to conjure a sense of dread in anyone who thinks about it.

Another conversation I had this week was about trauma-informed learning, whereby we tend to remember trauma vividly and it shapes the way we act in the future. In the military, we call them battle scars. Battle scars are hard-earned, and the British military has done an increasingly good job at debriefing people who have experienced trauma and helping them reframe that experience into something more positive. In business, we call it a mess-up, a product failure, a massive loss, a write-down on the balance sheet. We need to acknowledge the impact failure has on people, knowing that trauma can disrupt future performance.

There are still many organisations that, whilst they talk about being supportive and developmental, cannot tolerate failure. A failure is still a failure to them, and therefore a risk most employees cannot afford to take. I've also noticed that most organisations have a Learning and Development function, not a Failing and Development function. I wonder why that is.

In my experience, positive language and framing nearly always has an advantage over negative framing. So instead of failing fast, I prefer the term learning quickly. Some of you might think that's linguistic semantics. But from a small project I ran about a year ago, I found that groups we spoke to about failing fast were less likely to take risks because they still held that trepidation of failure. Those we spoke to about learning quickly were more ambitious, took more courageous steps, and stretched further than the "Failers" — for neuroscientific reasons I won't go into here. A better outcome from a simple shift in language.

A recent IBM report outlines that the most important skills for future employees and their leaders are a willingness to be flexible, agile, and adaptable to change. People need the ability to learn.

CEOs rank investment in people as the number one way to accelerate performance for organisations of the future. Organisations need to help people learn, faster and more efficiently.

When I coach clients, each session we set up an Experiment for something they are going to try as a leader between sessions. It's deliberately called an Experiment because it's designed with an informed hypothesis and an expected outcome in mind.

That expected outcome may or may not be reached. If it is, we want to understand why. If it isn't, we also want to understand why, so we can work out what to do differently next time. At no point do we frame it as failure. We look at why the experiment didn't go as expected and reflect on the learning hidden within, to build experience.

This coaching approach was informed by my learning about Lean methodology and the Toyota Production System. The Japanese engineers were equally interested in whether they produced Y percent more or less in a set time when they intended to complete X. The hypothesis was that the result would be X. If the result was plus or minus Y, the experiment hadn't gone as planned, and they wanted to understand why. Many innovative breakthroughs came from exactly that process.

Organisations post-COVID have a significant opportunity to learn quickly. Their clients, customers, and colleagues are also reassessing their business models, products, and services. There is an opportunity to learn quickly through collaboration and informed hypotheses about what to do next, and scope to run multiple experiments against controls to A/B test those hypotheses.

The same applies to leading teams. So how can you support your people to learn quickly? Here are three approaches.

Try using phrases like: "Let's try. I wonder what would happen if. How might you?"

This encourages an experimental curiosity. Then, if things don't go as planned, ask employees what they did rather than focusing on what went wrong, and encourage them to uncover what they learned and apply it. Some employees will fall short. They are already their own harshest critics, so you don't need to wade in and help with that part.

Try to create low-stakes learning opportunities before the stakes become higher.

I often use the phrase with leaders: "How can you let them graze their knees and not break their legs?" Learning happens when things don't go as expected. If you can help employees experience that learning earlier in their careers, or when it won't bring the business down in flames, you should try to do so. Make sure you are there to pick them up, dust them off, and set them back on track.

Try to share some of your own learning. Admitting our own mistakes is hard. We want to preserve our credibility with our teams. But when we can address those moments and the learning we took from them, we demonstrate humility and humanity as leaders. That matters to younger or less experienced team members who are watching to see whether it's safe to try things.

None of this means encouraging flippant, rash, or ill-considered action, or suggesting that actions shouldn't have consequences. Times are pressured enough. But your approach to this small change in language can make a meaningful difference to how your people perform.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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