Entrepreneurship #16 - "Intelligent Failure"
Finally - A Way To Talk About Failure That Makes Sense
The entrepreneurship community has long had a love affair with failure.
“Fail Early - Fail Often” has been a rallying cry for some. People produce “Fail Fests” to celebrate those who have tried, but failed. You’ll hear pundits say, “If you aren’t failing at something, you aren’t trying hard enough - you aren’t pushing the envelope.”
I’ve always disliked that characterization. It implies that you can just do anything - and shrug off the consequences - “Oops, I failed 🤷. Yay for me!”
I once heard Peter Thiel answer a question about celebrating trying-but-failing by pausing - and then saying something like, “Failure is highly overrated.”
I tend to agree. But neither polar position - “Failure Is Bad” or “Failure Is Good” - tells the whole story. On the one hand, Peter was right. On the other, you can always rationalize failure as, “If you characterize your failure as learning, it isn’t failure.” Either approach may be appropriate, depending on circumstance.
Recently, however, I read “How to find success with the 4 conditions of “intelligent failure” by Kevin Dickinson at Freethink - and I found a treatment of failure that I can love and that makes sense to me!
The article starts by describing different types of failures. None of us can escape unforeseen failures - “stuff” happens beyond our expectations due to complexity, and sometimes we humans just plain make mistakes - these are not intelligent failure, these are just plain old failures.
Dickinson goes on to describe intelligent failure.
It starts when you identify some area where you don’t have complete knowledge, but want to achieve some goal. You take an action toward achieving that goal, using a hypothesis of how you believe you can achieve it. But you understand ahead of time that your hypothesis may be wrong. And you know that whether it succeeds or fails, you still gain valuable knowledge about how to achieve the goal.
The key difference between this type of failure and random “oops” failure is leading with intent - specifically the intent to gain knowledge. The knowledge (either success or failure) has value because it is related to understanding how to achieve your business goal. It is not simply an after-the-fact rationalization, “Uhhh, I learned that I shouldn’t make silly mistakes. Haha.”
“Intelligent Failure” is a good description - and one I can live with. Thanks, Kevin! Go read his article and see if you agree with me.