Cutting through the hype to create alignment and business results
Most leaders have been exposed to the concept of “Fail, Fast, Forward” in its many different forms at 
least a few hundreds times. As a quick historical review, the concept started becoming mainstream in the mid-2000’s and basically took an old concept and made it more relevant to the digital age. I’m sure you’ve seen quotes such as Thomas Edison saying “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” on LinkedIn and Facebook many times and have made a mental note about how profound it is. In essence, “Fail, Fast, Forward is a concept that embraces learning from mistakes and moving forward; without making the same mistakes over and over again.
These sorts of quotes often inspire us to pass them along to our colleagues and team in hopes of motivating them to do something different. Unfortunately for many of us, the next email, text, call, or meeting gets in the way and we don’t really have a chance to create a culture that truly embraces fail, fast, forward.
I was recently facilitating a Fundamentals of Business Leadership simulation program and the issue of why Fail, Fast, Forward doesn’t “stick” came up. In the business simulation, participants make mistakes and learn how to fail, fast, forward in a risk-free environment. It was an interesting conversation coming from a group of middle-career leaders struggling with executing their real-world business strategy through individual contributors and core workers. Much of the intense conversation centered on the practical aspects of making it work as this group had a significant amount of skepticism.
Several vocal participants shared that while many senior level leaders talk a good game of embracing failure, it is usually just “lip service.” The truth is that many people fear failure and worse, their organizations punish it. As a result, the opposite usually happens and instead of embracing and learning from failure, many business people will make decisions to take short-cuts that avoid failure and at the same time side-step innovative growth that takes a company to the next level of success.
Based on research, focus groups, thousands of simulated business years, and our own Advantexe experiences working with leaders from more than 100 large organizations, I present three simple to understand, yet difficult to execute tips for leading a business environment to fail, fast, forward.
Create and communicate a clear and vivid vision of both the current and future value proposition to customers
The entire process has to start with your business strategy, goals, and objectives. Your job as a leader is to create and communicate a clear and vivid vision of the value proposition you offer to your customers so your people can understand why they are coming to work, and what it takes to be world-class at what you do. Whether you are selling hamburgers or finding the cure for cancer, the idea is the same; create clarity for everyone so they know what you do now and what you would like to do in the future. It is almost impossible to over communicate your business strategy and value proposition to keep your team educated, involved, and motivated as a way to get better.
Hire and retain people who care
In a world of high unemployment where it is a struggle to succeed and earn a long-term living, it shouldn’t be that hard to hire and retain people who care. It takes leadership discipline and courage to look at your team and separate the ones who are there for a paycheck and those that want to make a difference and do something special. If you want to create a real culture that is able to take risks, make mistakes, and then embrace them, then you need people who are willing to, and want to do that. Employees who avoid taking chances and take short-cuts to avoid mistakes don’t care about your long-term success. Realizing that in the world we live in it’s difficult to terminate an average employee, the hardest leadership decision you make is exiting employees that don’t fit your organization.
Provide real, sincere, open, and honest feedback and coaching to overcome mistakes
Ultimately, the ability to create an aligned organization that embraces the fail, fast, forward concept is the one that has the ability to seamlessly provide real, sincere, open, and honest feedback as easy as it is to breath. Understanding that this is almost impossible, it is what leaders need to strive for. And it doesn’t need to be overly complicated. There are hundreds of coaching models out there that enable someone to share with another person their perspective of the situation, what the person specifically did well or not well, the result of that behavior, and how that behavior should change to learn from the mistake and fail, fast, forward. Successful leaders embrace different styles of others and remove interpersonal conflict from the feedback in order to create alignment.
