Linkedin and other entrepreneurial forums are full of of posts celebrating failure. They range from "Fail as quickly as you kind" to "There is much to learn from failure", via "I don't fail, I just learn or achieve success". Some even go as far as telling that failure is the best education and that their is more value in failure than theory and more value in failure as in practice too. Some even propagate the idea that someone who failed before has more chance to succeed as someone who never did.
When reading this, one can get a feeling that the Shadoks are ruling the world of entrepreneurship. In this old French cartoon from the late 60's, strange bird-like creatures, the Shadoks, tried to build a rocket and they knew they had one chance in a million to succeed. In their skewed logic, they rushed into failing, on purpose, 999'999 times so that the 1'000'000th time work.
Are we there yet? Let us pause, take a step back and think, will you?
Let me state the obvious first, you know, just in case: every venture targets success. If your objective is to see your project fail, you're nothing short of a saboteur. There is nothing valuable to learn from failing on purpose.
With that being said, where does this failure culture come from? From the learning effect POTENTIALLY associated with failure. In this sentence, I can't stress "potentially" enough.
To learn from a quick failure, a system must be in place and it must allow you to learn from it and adjust. If you don't know why and how an attempts fails, how could you improve for the next one? Without such a system, some metrics, feedback loops and so on, all what you'll do is blindly shoot in the dark again and again. Putting such a system in place is not easy and requires experience.
The other idea being failing quick and learning is that it saves time and resources, which can then be helpful for the next attempt. So yes, if the idea under test is really not working, this is true. But the world of ideas is not that simple. Some ideas simply need more effort and ressources to succeed than others. Knowing when to declare and idea as failed is not easy and the idea that failure is so great should not push someone towards not trying harder.
In a similar way, preparation should not be neglected for the sake of failing more rapidly. If a step in the exploration and preparation process seems to take too long and you skip it, no wonder the venture will fail. And what would be the learning from this? If you decide to launch a new venture, you must give it a fair chance for success if you want to learn anything from it.
Failure shall not be punished or seen as a too much of a negative thing, but is shall also not be an excuse for not putting every effort in an idea, and this is hard work.
Finally, trust me on one thing: failure hurts. I've been there and I can tell you, it is not all rainbows and sparkles. However you sugarcoat it, failure will leave a bruise and possibly some deeper marks, and not only on you but on your whole team.
So can we now be a bit more realistic and stop encouraging people to fail for the sake of failing?
Thank you.