Years ago, Mark Zuckerberg took the world by storm with Facebook and the internal motto of “move fast and break things”. The motto was shortened in the industry to “fail fast”.
There is a fundamental problem with the “fail fast” approach that Amy Edmondson pointed out in her HBR article titled “Strategies For Learning from Failure”. She points out a spectrum of failure. On the one end of the spectrum, you have blameworthy failure that is a result of deviance, inattention, or lack of ability. This blameworthy failure should not be tolerated in an organization. On the other side of the spectrum is praiseworthy failure which is about hypothesis testing and exploration. With praiseworthy failure we are pushing the boundaries of our learning and knowledge. It is this kind of failure that we want to encourage and celebrate.
Linda Hill, brilliant researcher and professor at Harvard, suggested to leaders at Microsoft recently that we ought to change our thinking from fail fast (which can potentially include both ends of the spectrum) to learn fast. By focusing on a learn fast mantra we are focusing on the praiseworthy side of Dr. Edmondson’s spectrum.
The faster we learn the faster we can beat our competition, the better we can serve our customers and have a positive impact in the world.
My invitation to you today is this. Take a few minutes right now to pause and reflect on what you are doing to learn. Ask yourself the question, how might I speed up the process of learning? Ponder that question and right down your impressions and then go act on them!
