From FastCo Design: Only Certain Failures Help You Innovate

This is a neat post from FastCo Design, written by Jamer Hunt, organizing types of failures and which are productive or not productive ("Among Six Types of Failures, Only a Few Help You Innovate"). Here are his types; he organizes them from most severe to least:

• Abject Failure (aka a disaster)
• Structural Failure (requires significant rework and recovery)
• Glorious Failure (not completely sure what this is; he references the Jamaican bobsled team; I might call it a trivial failure. Something blows up, but no one is hurt and little damage done)
• Common Failure ("what the apology was invented for")
• Version Failure (something that doesn't work great but is the basis for improvement, such as Microsoft anything 1.0)
• Predicted Failure (the result of experimentation and prototyping)

Of these, only the last two are helpful for innovation in Hunt's view.

There's a lot to think about here. As Hunt writes, "we may now be able to recognize that there are valuable kinds of failure that are essential to innovation processes (version and predicted), while acknowledging that there are other types of failures that do little good."

I think what Hunt has done is very useful as a starting point for dialogue. The Mistake Bank is set up to share failures and learn from them. The diversity of stories and viewpoints here shows that there are many ways to view failures - and that many more types are productive than may be seen at first glance. We need to leave room for "the Happy Accident."