Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner

But there are ways to unravel this complexity and gain a clearer picture of what went wrong. There are strategies we can adopt to minimize the impact of our mistakes. And these strategies can help us make sure our failures are small-scale, easily reversible, and move us toward our bigger goals.

In a world where failure is inevitable, knowing how to fail better is invaluable, and that's what this book is about. It offers a step-by-step guide to designing and implementing effective systems and processes, so we can fail sooner and smarter and use our mistakes as foundations for success.

So who's this book for? "Fail Better" has a really wide audience, including managers, team leaders, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and consultants. If you're a project manager about to launch a new product or service, you'll find this book particularly useful. "Fail Better" also includes case studies from a range of sectors – from the international development field to tech and pharmaceutical companies – so its tips can be applied to most industries.

The book's broad reach reflects the authors' experience. Anjali Sastry is a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and a lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She researches how to apply systems thinking and business-based approaches to low-budget global health projects, and her work has taken her to Asia and Africa.

Kara Penn is cofounder and principal consultant at Mission Spark, which partners with non-profit and social enterprise leaders to bring about social change. She's worked with more than 60 non-governmental organizations, social enterprises, corporations, and foundations, and led award-winning community projects, helping to implement new approaches in complex settings.

So keep listening to hear how to plan your projects so you generate useful failures, how to experiment until you get it right, and how to record and analyze your mistakes so you can learn from them.

"Fail Better" is a practical book that demands more than a quick read – the authors want us to put their tips into practice. They help us do this by closing each chapter with a summary of lessons learned and a checklist of actions. This is all really useful, but it's a lot to take in, so you may want to read the book quickly first, then go back and work through it, or the parts of it of it that are relevant to you.

The book's three-part structure makes this easy to do. Part One explores the inevitability of failure in today's complex world and previews the authors' three-step Fail Better method.

Part Two looks at this method in more detail and is packed with practical advice to help you implement it. Then, in Part Three, the authors discuss the mindset managers or leaders need to adopt in order to get the most out of the Fail Better process, and they explore its potential for addressing some of the world's most pressing problems.

There are case studies throughout the book that bring the theories to life, including an in-depth look at BRAC, a Bangladeshi non-profit that's now the world's largest development organization. It's a great example e of what can be achieved with limited funds, provided you've got the right systems and processes in place.

So what is the Fail Better method? Step One is to do the right groundwork before launching a project, so it generates the right kind of failures – these are small, reversible, informative, and useful to your bigger goals.

Step Two is to build and refine products or services through experimentation and iterative action – in other words, lots of trial and error.

And Step Three is to identify and record the lessons learned, embed them into your organization's systems and processes, and share them as widely as possible. We're going to take a closer look at these steps, but first, a word on failure.

Not all failures are smart, reversible, or useful. Some failures are unpredictable – for example, they may be sparked by global banking crises or natural disasters. Others are avoidable or just plain dumb. These include safety violations, the deliberate flaunting of rules or guidelines, poor processes, or mistakes that result from overworked or under-skilled employees. We need to take steps to eliminate the wrong kind of failure.

But this book is about the right kind of failure. Let's take a closer look at the Fail Better method, starting with laying the right foundations, so your project yields some useful learning.

This is about getting it right from the start – identifying what you're trying to achieve or what problem you're trying to solve, gathering the right team and resources, understanding where there's room for trial and error, and creating an environment where constant reflection and feedback are welcome.

The most critical stage in this process is defining your mission or objective. To do this, the authors suggest drawing up a problem statement. This is a concise, specific sentence that describes the issue you're trying to resolve or the opportunity you're looking to seize, from the point of view of the people your project seeks to help or serve. This statement should also include a measureable element if possible – what would a solution look like?

Let's imagine your team has been asked to create a new brochure for a product or service. You could say your objective was: "We need to create a new brochure." But this gives no guidance as to why a new brochure is required or what it should look like. You need to delve deeper to define the exact problem you're trying to solve and who the beneficiary is.

Upon further enquiry, you discover potential customers don't pick up your company's brochure at sales conventions because they don't think it gives clear information about the product, prices, or service options. So it's the potential customers who have the issue.

This means your problem statement must acknowledge the need for a brochure that contains concise but comprehensive information about your product and pricing, so customers are informed enough to make a decision about signing up. Now your team has something specific to go on.

But say your company has rebranded and the old brochure doesn't reflect the new brand. This time, the marketing and branding departments have the problem, and the statement must include the need for customers to be able to pick out your firm's brand in a crowded marketplace and associate it instantly with quality and service.

Or maybe your sales reps don't like your brochure because it's too heavy or has no place for them to insert their business card. In this case, your sales reps need a clear, concise, easily portable way of showcasing your services to customers and closing sales. Your problem statement must reflect this.

The authors include some really great ideas about how to bring your problem statement to life, by using photos, sketching stick figures, or imagining quotes from potential customers. If you're trying to bring down waiting times at a health clinic, you could draw a picture of a long line of patients stretching around the block, for example.

We like the authors' focus on laying solid foundations and identifying exactly what the problem is before a project kicks off. This produces the right kind of learning and saves a lot of time. As your project develops, you can keep returning to your problem statement, or to the picture you drew of it, to make sure your actions are linked to desired outcomes.

Let's now look at what the authors have to say about iteration.

Effective experimentation helps create productive, innovative, and successful organizations. By constantly refining and improving our product or service through repeated actions, we get closer to our target.

Take online travel site Kayak.com. Kayak continually tests its software by putting out two fully operational versions of its site every week. Customers are randomly assigned to each site and Kayak analyzes its data to see which site performed better for its customers at the end of the week. It then pits the winning site against a new iteration the following week.

Not every aspect of a product or service needs to be reworked, so it's important to identify which activities you're going to test and why. You'll want to pick activities that offer the potential for effective feedback and scope for change. Once you've done this, you'll need to design tests that'll provide data that's useful for future work. Quick-and-dirty tests beat slow-and-expensive ones. The authors illustrate this well with a case study from the international design and consulting firm IDEO.

IDEO was designing interiors for a commercial airplane, specifically a double-decker airplane bed. But instead of building mock-ups to scale or trialing prototypes with customers, team members first tested options with an approach called "bodystorming" – a more physical version of brainstorming. They grabbed conference room chairs to see how it felt to lie in various seat configurations. One person lay under a row of three chairs while another lay on top of the seats. It took them just a minute to realize their design was flawed – it was too claustrophobic.

Now, you might say the designers could have reached the same conclusion without lying under the seats. But even if this story seems simplistic, we think it's a powerful example of the benefits of stepping away from the drawing board and testing options before building expensive prototypes.

IDEO's designers went on to do more sophisticated tests with true mock-ups of airplane cabins and real passengers, but the story of the chairs entered company lore as a reminder of the value of rapid tests. Maybe you could use bodystorming to quickly rule out a design, try role-play to test a service, or take a product prototype along to a focus group.

Of course, all this experimentation and testing will come to very little if you don't have a system in place to analyze what worked and what didn't, and to build on that. So let's hear how to learn from failures by gathering and evaluating useful data.

The first step on this journey is to put together a project archive. This should include documents like problem statements, meeting agendas, notes, photographs of whiteboards, emails, comments on drafts, and so forth. You could use a shared drive for this or any solution that works for your team.

This may sound time consuming and we know how tempting it is to dive into the next project without spending time analyzing the last one, but it's important to do this. The authors suggest you could have an archiving party – get team members together in a room for half a day and throw in lunch or an after-work drink.

The next step is to create a retrospective timeline for your project, dividing it into key stages and giving these stages names that describe what happened, and also how your team felt. What did you achieve at that stage of the project, what did you experience, or what obstacles came up? Was time wasted? Was the deadline too tight? Can you identify any failures you can learn from?

Once you've got the archive together and analyzed the timeline, you can assess your project against the outcome you wanted to achieve. Look at what you did and how well you did it. What was the result of your project? Did the team or individual members develop or grow in their skills or competencies? What was the real-world impact of your product or service? And what new knowledge did you gain?

With this data, you can improve your working practices, build better team habits, improve the way you approach projects, and reflect on your own management practice.

We agree it's vital to analyze past performance in order to embed learning and we think the authors' structured approach is really useful. It's all too easy to sweep mistakes under the carpet or explain them away to preserve reputations. Having an evaluation process that everyone buys into helps to avoid these traps.

We also like the final part of the book, where the authors' tone shifts and they discuss concepts like helpfulness, humble inquiry, compassion, and supportive management practices. This adds a softer, more human touch to what is a highly structured, detailed, and action-oriented business book.

We don't have many negative things to say about "Fail Better." There's perhaps a little too much jargon or management speak, which may irk some readers. But we can't fault the authors on the thoroughness of their approach, their commitment to providing practical tips, and the quality of their real-world examples. You'll likely come away convinced that the Fail Better model really does yield results.

"Fail Better" by Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn is published by Harvard Business Review Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.