Steve Jobs

Lots of articles in the past several months address the question of what is the relationship between failure and innovation... should you expect to fail if you want to innovate. How frequently should you fail? How quickly do we declare failure and move on to the next hypothesis? Some venture capitalists extoll the concept of "efficient failure", the art of recognizing a failure early and moving on. How does this attribute mesh with traditional notions of persistence or "stick to itiveness?

And, what kinds of environments foster innovation? Environments with open, loose standards in which people tolerate mistakes and don't demand much? Or environments in which leaders impose rigorous standards and show little tolerance for mistakes? Like most questions worth thinking about, this one has no easy answer... What do you think Steve Jobs would say?

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Encouraging Mistakes

How can we innovate without making (costly) mistakes? Basically, we can't. So, should we tolerate mistakes, or encourage them? Merely tolerating mistakes is not sufficient to encourage innovation and intellectual chance taking. The challenge for both individuals and businesses is to foster environments in which experimentation is encouraged and there are no (or few) inhibitions to trying out new untested ideas. If taken to its logical extreme, though, this philosophy might result in continuously failing businesses. One happy mistake after another.

So, somehow, we must communicate that there are no penalties for offering new solutions and there are rewards for offering up creative solutions while at the same time building our culture, which values intellectual honesty, integrity and rigor. This culture will enable us to test our hypotheses against our starting assumptions and objectives, and then efficiently discard those hypothesis (the majority) that don't  pass the test. We call this Efficient Failure.

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