Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Fail faster


"Good judgment comes from experience
and experience comes from bad judgments."

So, you want to be a leader... Did you know that leadership requires making mistakes?

It's ingrained in us from an early age to avoid making mistakes. We've all heard the old adages that tell us that only fools and the incompetent make mistakes. Nobody wants to be thought of as a buffoon or to be the butt of jokes. That said, you've got to focus on winning the war even when you lose a few battles. We LEARN from mistakes far more than we learn from successes.


"While one person hesitates because he feels inferior,
the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior." Henry Link

A wise person learns from others' mistakes, as well as his own. Hopefully, these potential descriptions of bad judgment will help you avoid stepping in the same shtuff yourself. That way, you, too, can become superior.

Avoid This Error #1: Operating without a clear vision.

With a clear, consistent, unified vision, everyone on the team can instantly detect a failure and make the necessary corrections to the course. Without it, you'll get "wandering," or worse.

Avoid This Error #2: Don't Assess What Happened.

There's a natural desire to quickly move on after something bad occurs. Be ready to stop that behavior in its tracks. It is critical for the team to stop to ask, "What just happened?" and "What can we learn from this?"

Avoid This Error#3: No communication of learned lessons.

If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does anything get done differently next time? It's critical the lessons from the failure are communicated across the entire team, so everyone has a chance to learn.

Avoid This Error #4: Inflexibility and No iteration or experimentation allowed.

No team should rush in without at least a little planning, but things are rarely as easy as 'Ready, Aim, Fire." Better is Plan, Do, Check, Correct, Repeat.

Avoid This Error #5: Building too much before a feedback cycle.

When I was a young Councilman...oh, heck, I still have trouble with this...I had a tendency to want to "write it all down," designing everything from the "happy path" to trying to identify all and avoid or mitigate all the things that might go wrong. Unfortunately, when such plans meet the enemy called reality, the plans are usually far off. A lot of the work gets wasted, the team feels disempowered, the plans don't include good ideas from more people, and the plans are inflexible (in fact, we try to 'stick to the failing plan' more often than not).

The best teams get feedback early in the cycle using a variety of quick prototyping tools. They don't start implementing until they've collected substantial user feedback to know they are heading in a solid direction. Then they do it again and again. It's Plan, Do, Check, Correct, Repeat, just as before.

Avoid This Error #6: Not instrumenting the design.

Many teams don't think about how they'll tell if the design is working. They launch
without measures in place. The best teams conceive and build in their instrumentation from the start of the project. The really best ones even start with the measures as part of their vision.

Avoid This Error #7: Not enough depth in feedback.

"Was this helpful? Y/N" is an interesting question, it doesn't tell the team enough information to know what to do more or less of next time? The best teams ensure they are going deep when collecting feedback from users. (For example, Netflix combines both live site A/B tests with in-lab usability testing, so they can see design issues from both a quantitative and qualitative viewpoint.)


In the end, are you the kind of leader who has the guts to tolerate failure as a part of growth, the most critical component for a productive approach to failure is the organization's culture. A culture that accepts failure as a part of growth and celebrates every learned experience will always outplay a risk-averse culture. The organization's management and reward structure needs to accommodate failure, regularly celebrating those who take risk and promote their insights. Does your chapter's do this?

As a final note, remember that tolerance for failures does not mean you have to tolerate behavior that doesn't strive for growth. If you're getting the fail! part from someone, but not getting the desire and attitude to learn from the failures, there's a personal problem that must be addressed on a personal level.

Go to it, Brothers!

(excerpts and paraphrasing from "Failure Is THE Option", by Jared M. Spool. Read the full article on the User Interface Engineer web site at: http://tinyurl.com/6phu96)

In F, S, & C,

The Exponent Team

Pursue Excellence Relentlessly!

The NEW Triangle Fraternity Exponent

"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less."
-- General Eric Shinseki
This is the New Exponent.

While the newsletter format of The Exponent has served well since its launch in 1995, the format is getting more than a bit long in the tooth. In addition to just needing an upgrade, some data is indicating that younger members aren't using email as much as the oldsters and we want both to continue to be the Exponent's audience. There's an old adage that says that it’s always best to change before one has to. Unfortunately, with the burgeoning of social media and other technology phenonena in recent years, I think The Exponent, at 15 years of age, has maybe missed "before" by 2-3 years. So, we'll fall back on the "better late than never" adage this time!

So what’s the new format? After a lot of careful thought to what the new format should look like. we decided that the best would be a blog.

...Ok, the Truth is that a few of us had a short chat about it and figured out a way that we thought would both reach the target audiences in a way that was easy for the audiences and for us, the maintainers. That's how we decided that we'd blog... Ray Bradbury probably summed up our approach to the change best when he said, “You’ve got to go up to the edge of the cliff, jump off, and build your wings on the way down.”

By the way, The Exponent will also be made available through Facebook. "Subscribers" will be able to access The Exponent directly from blogger.com. They'll also be notified through email, Facebook, and Twitter when a new post comes.

The other major change will be that the posts will be shorter. There will probably be one "article" each time, but more frequent posts.

You'll also have the opportunity to have discussions about each post, if you want. What better way to learn from each other - active to active, alumnus to alumnus, active to alumnus?

Have any other ideas to make The Exponent be better? We'd love to hear them. Send them to Tim Eiler minn87 at exponent@triangle.org!

Welcome to a better way to do business!

In F, S, & C,

The Exponent Team

Pursue Excellence Relentlessly!