Fail Fast is a term often heard in the agile community. They are completely serious when making this statement. Failure is not only acknowledged, it is embraced. The old story about Thomas Edison is that he not only figured out how to create a light bulb, he also found out many different ways that fail to make a working light bulb.
So, if failure is inevitable, the faster you fail, the faster you succeed!
The point is not starting out with an intention to fail. The point is to address areas that are least known to you, and address them early on with small projects that can fail or succeed. If they fail, you haven’t spent a great deal of time going down a bad path. If there is promise you can tweak the project for another term. If they succeed, you are on to your next area of concern or risk.
Failing/succeeding fast is not easy. Often there is no support for developing a system as a prototype. There is a mindset required in the culture of management and technical professionals where everyone acknowledges there is a gap in understanding how to solve a problem. All must agree that there will be attempts to solve the problem, and some attempts will be abandoned entirely.
Interestingly, some failures result in solving some other problem. A famous one is the sticky notepad. Instead of making a strong glue as was the goal, the development of what we now know as PostIt was the result.
Fail Quick; Fail Often. The sooner you do, the sooner you will find success. Leave a comment here to get into the conversation. Why not share how your failure led to success?
Cheers,
Ben