Legal Research

The Five Kinds of Failure

By admin

I often advocate failing. Failing often in small doses helps to avoid the big (and public) failures.

My fave (got all his books since Permssion Based Marketing!), Seth Godin, expessed it well in the following post from his blog:

“A hierarchy of failure worth following

Not all failures are the same. Here are five kinds, from frequency = good all the way to please-don’t!

1. FAIL OFTEN: Ideas that challenge the status quo. Proposals. Brainstorms. Concepts that open doors.

2. FAIL FREQUENTLY: Prototypes. Spreadsheets. Sample ads and copy.

3. FAIL OCCASIONALLY: Working mockups. Playtesting sessions. Board meetings.

4. FAIL RARELY: Interactions with small groups of actual users and customers.

5. FAIL NEVER: Keeping promises to your constituents.

The thing is, in their rush to play it safe and then their urgency to salvage everything in the face of an emergency, most organizations do precisely the opposite. They throw their customers or their people under the bus (“we had no choice”) but rarely take the pro-active steps necessary to fail quietly, and often, in private, in advance, when there’s still time to make things better.

Better to have a difficult conversation now than a failed customer interaction later.”

Yep – failure can be good. It can also be used to make progress.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on August 11, 2010 (boomark / email).