Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Fail fast, fair early is a mantra in today’s knowledge work. Sometimes, however, we are confused about what is a failure.

Fail fast, fail early! (Some persons say it the other way around and mean the same thing.) The idea is simple:

1. Try something
2. Learn something
3. Adjust
4. Go back to step 1.

“But we are not allowed to fail,” protest some. True. If you are a firefighter, you need to extinguish the house fire on the first try. Same thing with heart surgeons. The list goes on.

And then there is the notion of what constitutes “failure.” “We tested the product, and it failed the test.”

Wrong. A test or an experiment fails when it does not provide information. Consider:

“We built a product that should work at zero degrees F. We tested it, and it stopped working at 20 degrees F.”

That test was a success. It provided information. The product does not work as desired. Our activities succeeded. We learned. Our product failed. We learned.

The main point is, “we learned.”

Let us strive to conduct good experiments often.

So instead of

“Fail fast, fail early”

how about

“Experiment often.”