Failing for Success

Listening to Reinhold Messner live last night and also watching the movie Manaslu by Hans Kammerlander, both world renowned alpinists talk quite a bit about their struggles and the challenges they overcame, or couldn’t. This gave me a new perspective on the concept of failing.

The idea of having full control over the results of a project is a common desire, but impossible to achieve in extreme outdoors settings.
Kammerlander’s movie makes it very clear, that when circumstances change within minutes, the ability to assess new settings and adjust quickly is critical for success, even survival and invariably include the ability to accept bad decisions and recover immediately.

The same applies to complex technology projects, as now any project is subject to rapidly changing conditions.

The Agile interpretation of this approach is summarized the statement ‘fail fast, fail forward.’

In an Agile setting failure comes quickly after a new approach is being followed, almost inevitably. And, that’s by design: the investment made in a new idea is not as big as in a traditional waterfall model where cohorts of people could be working on this new concept for weeks or months before it is unveiled – and possibly not accepted by its users. In two week sprints that follow the observe-reflect-make principle, prototypes help to detect issues quickly and the the impact of failure is not as big, and it is quite easy to recover from it. This is the picture of a toddler learning to walk: Pulling himself up, falling down, getting up again until he finally can walk on his own.

A major insight in Messner’s talk was, how important it is not to center this experience around yourself, personally. It is about persevering to pursue your goals, and being comfortable and in the safe zone will not drive you to excellence. In order to achieve great things, one has to bring all his capabilities together. That only happens outside the comfort zone, and with the immanent risk of failure. If you don’t fail, it simply means you are not pushing hard enough.

Failure is only a failure if it’s final, if you don’t learn from it and give up. If you continue to persevere failure is part of getting better. Fail fast, fail forward!