A Thought About Mistakes and Failures

I recently read a couple of articles:

• "The new #Fail: Fail fast, fail early and fail often" by Dominic Basulto
• "Fail Fast, Fail Cheap: Get your idea into the marketplace, and learn from customers" by Doug Hall 

I worked for a couple of decades in the management of grant-making programs intended to promote innovations of value to developing nations. We were using a crowd-sourcing approach to get innovative ideas, and indeed I have personally reviewed more than 10,000 submitted ideas for developments that would benefit poor people in poor countries.

We used a system in which people submitted very short statements of their ideas and how they planned to develop them with a grant that would be quite small. A few, very experienced people would screen these submissions dividing them into three classes:

• Some proponents were invited to submit a longer, better documented proposal to be peer reviewed;
• Some proponents were encouraged to submit a better think piece for the next competition (because we felt there might be a suitable innovation but were not sure of that conclusion based on the original submission);
• Some proponents were thanked for their efforts, but were not encouraged to go further with our program.

So I do get the point of making decisions quickly and cheaply in order to maximize progress. In thinking back on the experience, I am sure we did help a lot of people further develop good ideas, some of which made a big difference when they were widely applied. On the other hand, I realize that we were not smart enough to recognize all the good ideas that we saw, and I hope that people with those ideas did not quit when we turned them down. There is a difference between not succeeding in a trial and failing. You can recover from a mistake, especially if it is made early and cheaply. It is especially important not to quit of someone else makes a mistake about your idea.

On the other hand, I think it important to be sure that when you make a mistake early, it is really affordable. I have been listening to Colin Powell on television in the background as I post this as he discusses the decision to disband the Iraqi military after the invasion had succeeded. The United States had conquered the Iraqi military relatively cheaply, at least in terms of the number of troops we had on the ground. Then the decision was made to disband the Iraqi military and to do a massive elimination of Baath Party members from all government agencies. That in retrospect was almost surely a mistake, and it was clearly a early mistake, but it almost certainly not a cheap mistake.