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At my first job, one of my most distinctive memories was proposing a new idea and having it shut down because “We tried that before and it didn’t work.” As someone at the beginning of my career I thought I was being given important knowledge that would help me avoid wasting my time. If they tried it before and it didn’t work, then it couldn’t be done.
Now I know better.
Just because we fail at something does not mean no one will ever succeed! One attempt, or even a few attempts, does not prove something impossible. The world is constantly changing and a different person with a different approach at a different time might succeed where everyone else has failed.
However, it’s easier on our self esteem to believe something is impossible. It requires a lot of humility to admit failure, especially if it’s because of something we did wrong. Much easier to claim no one could possibly ever get it done!
When trying to learn from failure, don’t assume the task is impossible. Instead ask some better questions:
Was the timing wrong? Sometimes a product or idea is too early, and would succeed if tried again later. Webvan was too early but Instacart is fantastically successful, even though both had the same idea. Webvan was way too early.
Was the strategy wrong? Just because you have the right idea, doesn’t mean you go about it in the right way. Nokia could have built a device like the iPhone, they had every advantage, but their strategy was completely wrong and they could not react to the market.
Was the solution flawed? Sometimes you have the right timing and strategy, but your product or solution has a fatal flaw. Often, that takes the form of the wrong pricing or the wrong business model. If you charge too much, or too little, you can fail to win regardless of everything else.
This sounds easy when I frame it this way! However, it’s very easy to fall into the “it’s impossible” trap and teams do it all the time. The worst part is that leaders often don’t see this trap taking hold because it happens in random meetings and discussions. “We already tried that” is almost as common as “That’s how we do it here” at most companies.
Of course, sometimes it is impossible! There are things that can’t be done, and you don’t want your team trying the same things over and over again and failing constantly! That’s the opposite of efficiency. At some point, you do need to learn from failure.
This is a balance you need to instill in your team. You need them not to give up on something just because they failed once, but not to keep trying over and over again without success. The key lies in those questions above, which come down to:
If you try again, has something fundamentally changed that makes us believe the outcome will be different?
As long as the answer is “yes”, then trying again might be a good idea. Just asking the question has already potentially changed the outcome, because it means you are learning from experience! And that is always progress.
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Facebook is maybe the best example of this (not the first social media co by a long shot!). Nevertheless now ~30% of humans use it monthly! A reasonably good set of question to ask is: why did those other co's fail...or what do we know they didn't know / is why now compelling / our team better suited etc...I think the key is probably to be explicit about this. It's easy to just hand wave it away and that's probably the wrong answer :).