Fail fast and prosper

By Fiona Boyd |

Every Wednesday David and I have a business/life lunch to discuss the professional and personal issues going on in our lives and to do a little impromptu brainstorming. Almost everything we’re doing at the moment has been a product of our regular mid-week lunches that we’ve been doing for a few years now.

The most recent one last week at The Pantry was dominated by talk of the football (we’ve missed it – roll on winter and football in Melbourne!) and what’s going on at our football club, St Kilda Saints right now. In 2009 we became used to a style of Saints football where the players seemed to be totally adept at keeping themselves out of the news and the papers. We suspected an iron discipline and determination among the player group – focused totally on the things you want your team to be focused on, that is, playing the game hard and winning.

St Kilda didn’t win the premiership last year, but everything about the team reeked Grand Final material all throughout the year. There were no behavioural mishaps, the players worked themselves extremely hard, and when what the local press called the “B team” was sent to play Hawthorn in Tasmania late in the season when everyone was starting to flag, they ground out a totally convincing win. Not only were the stars of the club winning the games, but also the significant depth of talent sitting behind them were winning them too.

The 2009 Grand Final itself was extraordinary. I’m not romanticizing what I saw when I explain that it was the closest thing to seeing the Gods face off on Mount Olympus that I have ever come to in my entire life. It helped of course that we were about 10 rows back right behind the goal and the St Kilda Cheer Squad. What a game, I mean this really was gladiator time and whilst St Kilda did not ultimately win, I think everyone there knew that they’d played the most determined game of the two teams.

So we ended 2009 pretty much with the belief that the St Kilda Saints had a great chance, if it stuck to its knitting and its total self-discipline, of winning the premiership in 2010.

And then came the rumbles. Andrew Lovett, a recruit from Essendon brought himself to negative attention in public a couple of times over the summer break, and one of those incidents has led to him being charged with rape. Now all sorts of sports commentators are saying that St Kilda has been heavy-handed in sacking this new recruit, before he’s even played a game with the Saints, but when Ross Lyon fronted the media last Tuesday at Moorabbin and let it be known that Lovett was no longer with the club, he did the best thing that a startup business, or any kind of business innovation can do, that is, St Kilda failed fast.

That’s right. They admitted the recruiting decision in this instance was wrong, and instead of letting a long and dull saga of increasingly negative innuendo and wrong-footedness play out, they cut this tragedy short, admitted the failure and moved on.

Grand Final Day 2009 just before the Saints run on. The Saints executed a 'fast fail' this week and we think, will prosper bigtime for it.

And this is one of the key lessons that David and I also learned in the Arts Hub journey. And if you’re going to learn it empirically rather than vicariously (ie if no-one else is around to guide you, you’ll have to do this the hard way, as we did) then you’re going to waste lots of time, energy, money and attention on your own business Greek tragedy. The trick with any new business, or new strategy is to work out what the success factors should be (and be reasonable, blue sky dreaming is not required at this stage), apply a small amount of resource and then test, test, test. You can learn so much by not going in boots and all and instead understanding that not everything that’s worked in other places has general universality. Getting a strategy to work in your setting is an experiment until proven otherwise – and like all good experiments, you don’t bet the house or the farm on it. And if it doesn’t work, you learn what you can from it, and you move on.

Now in my view, St Kilda paid way too much recruiting Andrew Lovett and this will be a bit of a sticking point for them as his exit will be costly for them. I do understand their position though, it will be more costly to have someone whose personal discipline is not up to the rest of the team’s standards in the long run. Nothing is worse than an elite team being held back by a member whose standards just don’t meet that of the rest of the team. But they’ve done the business now and Friday night’s win in the NAB Cup against Collingwood, even though it wasn’t spectacular, does show that at least psychologically, the players have ‘moved on’ from the Lovett failure.

David and I have put the ‘fail fast’ approach into practice a number of times – and when we haven’t followed this method, it has cost us bigtime. Early on in the Arts Hub experience our fast fails were all to do with hiring the wrong type of staff for a startup business. People who want certainty and security do not belong in a startup business – what you need are flexible, adaptive people who can respond and also initiate change with energy and positive momentum. We learned the hard way and had the wrong team for our type of business for probably a year longer than we should have. Restructuring and losing everybody and starting again from a clean hiring slate, really helped us turn the corner in terms of Arts Hub’s success and its sustainability as a business.

We did better next time when we had a ‘fast fail’ with a business partnership. When the signs were there that this partnership was not benefiting us, we sought the exit doors and ran through them. Looking back at this time – it was intense and uncomfortable but was exactly the right thing to do.

If you want to hear more about why it’s better to ‘fail fast’ than to cling on to a ride going nowhere, Mark Pincus who founded Tribe which was a bit of a slow fail, and who learned what needed to be learned and has gone on to found and lead Zynga – has some good lessons to teach. You can see him interviewed here.

Before you start your next new thing, think about it in terms of a small experiment, and ask yourself, at what point should I see results and if they’re not there, when should I call it a ‘fail’? Many, many successful businesses, if you dig a little deeper will tell you that for every success there was at least one fail sitting behind it, sometimes more. Fail fast, fail often and learn what is there to be learned, then move on and up.

And don’t forget to get back up and get out there again. We’re looking forward to St Kilda Saints as Premiers in 2010, having made it through their first fast fail for 2010, it’s time now to set their eyes on where they’re heading and not where they’ve most recently been.

Photo: Flickr davideedle

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