Creating a Fail-Fast Culture to Accelerate Innovation

Five Simple Steps to a Fail-fast Culture

1. Tolerate Failure

First and foremost, if employees are afraid to fail, they will be afraid to innovate. They may try too hard to make their ideas work because they fear ridicule for a failed idea.

Creating a culture of psychological safety in which employees are prepared to try ideas without feeling the pressure for them to succeed can support innovation, creativity, resilience, and learning. Better still, it should help cultivate a culture in which colleagues are inspired to submit new ideas and be more supportive of each other when the ideas don't succeed. 

2. Learn from failure 

Building on the freedom to fail, employees should be encouraged to actively learn from failure. When an intrapreneur learns something from the project, it provides clear insights on the next steps.

Employees can achieve success by either adapting a failed idea or trying a new approach. This is similar to how athletes learn from losses and come back stronger the following year. When you make innovation tangible and integrate a time for reflection, failures will aid your experience and knowledge.

3. Be open to iteration

Even failed ideas have the potential to teach you something. In many cases, though, you don’t have to abandon a concept altogether.

Iterative approaches to innovation often deliver the best long-term results. When working with tech, for example, there is no need to shoot for immediate perfection as you can always release software patches or other updates. Meanwhile, when iteration is geared towards incremental changes, the demands on R&D resources are reduced. So, failed innovations can be abandoned far sooner.  

4. Pretotype  

Innovation has relied on prototyping for many generations. However, the fail-fast culture can be taken to even greater heights courtesy of pretotyping. A pretotype is described as “a stripped-down version of a product, used to merely validate interest”. In that sense, it is similar to an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), which has just enough features to be used by potential customers who can then provide feedback for further product development.

It is suggested that pretotypes can transform innovation, particularly in tech spaces because traditional prototypes are too fully formed, making it harder to kill the innovation early due to the time needed in development as well as a reluctance from innovators to give up.

Pretotypes, MVPs and virtualizations of proposed innovations can highlight possible problems far sooner, allowing employees to move on more efficiently. 

5. Collaborate positively

A fast-failure culture will be exceedingly difficult to create when working narrow mindedly. Therefore, opening the door to a diverse team of leaders and intrapreneurs will ensure that all innovations are seen from multiple perspectives. This will ultimately help highlight any issues far sooner, which is better than discovering them too late. When all parties are focused on the organizational objectives rather than holding any sentimental attachment, a stricter but better philosophy for evaluating ideas will be established.