On the Fail-Fast Strategy

We grow on our mistakes. The sheer number of them we’ve gotten through is a precise gauge of our experience. But, as they say, not all mistakes are equally useful.

Imagine we’re bringing a new product to market — one that, we’re sure, will change the world (otherwise, why bother, right?). The first customer surveys come back lukewarm, but we decide they simply didn’t get it, and… we double down. Still no buzz, but, certain we’re right, we pour in even more: into the team, into production, into advertising. And in the end the cost of the mistake becomes catastrophic.

The fail-fast strategy is about catching broken hypotheses and failures as early as possible — so we don’t burn resources on ideas that were doomed from the start, but instead learn quickly, react quickly, and course-correct. Which, in turn, lets us reach our goals faster and more effectively.

Everything in this world is a hypothesis. Every idea, theory, product, relationship — and sometimes even what we held to be an axiom. Successful hypotheses are always an order of magnitude rarer than the failed ones. On top of that, the world is changing fast — what worked yesterday may not work today. Knowledge, skills, approaches all go stale. Our success depends directly on how fast we can test hypotheses and how coolly we can draw conclusions. When we see that something isn’t moving, no matter how much effort we throw at it, and we keep spending time on it anyway, all we’re doing is cutting down the number of attempts we get per unit of time.

I often watch people spend a whole life on one single attempt, afraid to admit it failed and to walk through the pain of change. Sometimes losing face in front of yourself is hard. But it’s necessary.

The fail-fast strategy matters most of all in our dealings with people. Only a few percent of the entrepreneurs surveyed on the Harvard EMBA course regretted deciding too early to part ways with a partner or an employee after spotting the first red flags, without waiting to see how things would unfold. Everyone else admitted the opposite: they wished they’d done it sooner.

I’ve come to this conclusion: if, after three months of working together, even a faint intuitive sense of discomfort shows up — something “presses on the chest” — even when everything is formally fine, but suspicious warning bells start ringing, it’s better not to hope for a miracle and not to keep walking the path together. Almost always it only gets worse, and the cost of the decision starts growing exponentially. It’s one of the hardest skills to build, but it’s worth it!

Here’s to all of us failing more often — but in small ways. To testing our hypotheses, drawing conclusions on the fly, and building a perfectly working scheme for our lives, in business and in love! 😎