Fall Better to Succeed
Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn tell us
to make smart mistakes to succeed faster
We are all familiar with the fable
of King Robert Bruce of Scotland who hid in a cave after running away from a
battlefield and how he was aston ished to see a spider trying again and again
to make the web till it succeeded.
The logic is simple: learn from your
mistakes and try again. In Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed
Sooner, Anjali Sastry of MIT Sloan School of Management and consult ant Kara
Penn make a similar point.
Perspiration, they say, is
inspiration's overlooked but essential companion, needed to deliver on genius.
The book's title is inspired by a
line from Irish novelist Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho: “Try again, fail again,
fail better.“ “It is almost impossible to escape failure in a world which is as
complex as ours. Somehow or the other we will all fail. But the question is,
that what do we do with that? Failure is a critical moment in people's lives
and the only good thing about it is the learning,“ says Penn, who is the
cofounder and Principal Consultant for Mission Spark as social enterprise based
in Colorado.PHOTO: BHARAT CHANDA One of the core ideas of Fail Better is the
importance of iteration in pro jects. Iteration involves repetition of a
procedure, as a means of obtaining suc cessively closer approximations to the
solution of a problem. Planning for re iteration requires extra work, and only
some activities warrant it. According to the authors, there is incredible power
in designing activities for iteration.“That way you can test and improve,
figuring out what you have learnt, distilling your insights and sharing them
and then turning these useful insights into practice,“ says Sastry.
Fail Better presents real world
examples like that of Eli Lilly, the American pharma giant. Eli Lilly's
promising chemotherapy drug Almita was causing unexplained deaths in clinical
trials and was deemed a failure. The company was on the verge of giving up,
when the physician leading the trials decided to dig deeper. He was given two
weeks' time by the company and with the help of a staff mathematician who was
skilled in statistics, he analysed the outcomes and found that the patients who
suffered from negative effects had deficiencies in folic acid.Further
investigations proved the giving the patients folic acid with Almita solved the
problem. This is how the company snatched success from the verge of what they
thought was an imminent failure.
According to Sastry, there should be
a system, method and structure where you can take on board the general advice
to learn from failure and make it into something which is useful. The very act
of professionally writing up a description of failure is a learning act in
itself. “In consumer companies, you make a lot of mistakes when you are trying
to launch new products into a market. We do see a lot of them having failure
parties,“ she says.
Companies need to free their
executives to make failures early, so that they learn and benefit from it and
Fail Better uses the early failures of products like Postit Notes, Viagra and
New Coke to make the point. Then there's Harley Davidson, presented as a case
for “mak ing issues visible.“ As the head of Powertrain Operations at the
company, Don Kieffer ran the engine plants, overseeing the process of
introducing new engines into the production line. In 2003, when the company was
hunting for increased quality and was trying to speed up its time to market,
Kieffer made the processes, progress and problems visible so that the teams
could prioritise their activities. After eight months, the engine plant was
outperforming all other teams at Harley Davidson.
In high risk professions, there are
ex-post facto studies or after-the-fact researches. Sastry feels such analysis
comes too late. “You need to check if there is a causal relationship between
the work we do and the impact on this world,“ says Sastry. “If managers don't
make their prior assumptions salient before they undertake an action, if they
are contradicted by their experience, that mismatch is not highlighted and
everything gets a sense of taken for granted.“
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