From FailCon: Designing for Failure - Lessons from Jetpack Joyride

This post was contributed by FailCon, an international conference on common business
failures and how to recover from them. http://thefailcon.com. FailCon has a blog that discusses subjects near to our heart.

I recently sat in on a post-mortem presentation at GDC by Luke Muscat of Halfbrick games, the creator of Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride.  While he discussed dozens of ingenious tidbits on how to keep people feeling challenged, spending money, and generally having a good time, one thing stood out as especially relevant to us: Jetpack Joyride is designed to make the player fail. Over. And Over. And Over.  In fact, it relies on the user not only failing but enjoying it so much that they stick around and share it with friends.  With millions of downloads, clearly it’s working.

So just how have they made inevitable failure so fun, and what can the rest of us learn from this?

Reward Failure:  In Jetpack Joyride, with your ultimate death comes an immediate reward screen recognizing your progress, any mission goals you accomplished, and offering you a slot machine chance for any coin you picked up.  This can be pretty easily practiced with yourself and employees, too.  When encountering a failure (either personal or amongst employees), focus less on the problem that happened and more on what risks were taken, what was learned, and how this is going to improve the process down the road.  Keep yourself and the team feeling engaged with the organization, and show that each failure does contribute to the final product.  Make it very clear that taking well-informed, relevant risks is a good thing.

Always Have A Next Step: Immediately after exploding, Joyride shows you what your current missions are, to remind you that there is still more to get done.  This is by far the most important take-away for business leaders.  The quickest way to recover from a personal failure is to know what the next step is.  Before taking a big risk, set up a contingency plan: know exactly what things might help in a recovery, and have a short and easy to-do list on the side.  That way, when failure rears it’s ugly head, you can smile and nod and turn your attentions immediately to the next step, without having to worry about getting stuck in a rut.

Reduce the Barrier To Retry:  Joyride is a quick game with a one-tap ability to replay after failing.  Make failing that easy in your organization.  Use the Next Steps tips to always have a way for people to start again.  More important, make sure no one is dwelling on the failure.  The worst thing you can do is hold it against someone, having a three-strikes rule or anything like that.  This will make each re-entry more frightening.  Discuss what happened promptly, incorporate the lessons, and then move on to something new.

Most people design a business for success; it keeps everyone positive and envisioning a clear final goal.  But businesses rarely reach the first goal they sit; dozens of road blocks come up along the way, and you need to be able to recover and pivot quickly.  While you should keep strong goals in your mind, designing for failures - making them manageable and recoverable - is safer and more realistic for yourself and your company.

World-class safety programs use "fresh eyes & high standards" - shouldn't you?

From "Blow-Ups Happen," part of the Economist's March 2012 special report on the future of nuclear power:

After Three Mile Island, the American Nuclear Industry set up its Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. INPO, headquartered in Atlanta, regularly inspects power plants, using its own staff as well as engineers from other operators, and offers lessons learned from mistakes throughout the industry so that all plants benefit from what happened at any one of them. INPO brings fresh eyes and high standards, and its reports can be scathing.

Let's set aside the question of whether even a world's best safety culture can make nuclear energy safe enough.  (The Economist report does a terrific job of wrestling with that question.)

Imagine that you are in a business that does not have the same risks. Would it not benefit you to, as INPO does, "offer lessons learned from mistakes" and "bring fresh eyes and high standards" to evaluating your own performance and the strengths and weaknesses of what you manage?

Game Designer Colin Northway: "I was looking under smaller and smaller rocks for game ideas"

Another mistake story from the GDC 2012 "Failure Workshop." This was excerpted from Kris Graft's excellent writeup in Gamasutra, a gaming industry site:

Fantastic Contraption developer Colin Northway talked about the importance of identifying failure in its early stages. He spent several months trying to find the gameplay breakthrough in projects such as the bird-inspired Flocking, but they just didn't materialize.

Flocking was a project "that I thought was fantastic and a good idea, but one ... that I couldn't get to function as a video game," said Northway. He stressed to developers that just because you're really in love with an idea, "you won't always be able to make a game about that."

"I was looking under smaller and smaller rocks for game ideas," he said. That search is often futile. "That's the downfall of a lot of game designers," he said.

"When you're doing game design you should be picking among the ripest fruit... your job is to find the sweetest fruit. ... your job is not to eke something out of the cracks that will be playable."

Now, Northway feels that he has found his way out of the game design wilderness. He's currently working on a beautiful game called Incredipede, which appeared at Tokyo Game Show's Sense of Wonder Night. "I hope none of you get lost, and I hope all of you make your way out," he said.

I salute the GDC for holding this session, and especially to the game designers for sharing their stories. There is loads of research referred to on this site to show that destigmatizing and sharing mistakes is immensely helpful for learning and for ongoing improvement. Finding one's way out of the wilderness is a very valuable experience, and telling others about it is a great act of generosity.

Tim Harford's video compilation of mistake quotes (with a blues soundtrack)

Tim Harford, author of "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure," posted a video compilation of quotes about mistakes and failure, backed by Charley Jordan's "Titanic Blues."

My favorite discovery in the video was this quote by Laurence Peter, co-author of "The Peter Principle":

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and informed just to be undecided about them.

Ron Adner mini-podcast: Why smart companies make avoidable innovation mistakes

After our recent interview with Ron Adner, author of "The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation," we got to chatting, and in that exchange we talked about the reasons smart companies can fall into the trap of a too-narrow viewpoint. I

You can learn more about The Wide Lens at its website, where chapter 1 is available to read for free.

Mini-Podcast:
Ron Adner after interview discussion (4:15)

Not a news flash, but important: negative experiences are more potent than positive ones

In today's New York Times, business writer Alina Tugend (quoted elsewhere on this site) takes up a topic we know well on this site - the potency of negative experiences, and their ability to outweigh seemingly equal positive ones ("Praise Is Fleeting, but Brickbats We Recall"). A key excerpt:

Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University, captured the idea in the title of a journal article he co-authored in 2001, “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” which appeared in The Review of General Psychology. “Research over and over again shows this is a basic and wide-ranging principle of psychology,” he said. “It’s in human nature, and there are even signs of it in animals,” in experiments with rats.

As the article, which is a summary of much of the research on the subject, succinctly puts it: “Bad emotions, bad parents and bad feedback have more impact than good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.”

Tugend also quotes one of our favorite authors, Teresa Amabile, describing the research that formed the basis for her book The Progress Principle:

“We found that of all the events that could make for a great day at work, the most important was making progress on meaningful work — even a small step forward,” said Professor Amabile.... “A setback, on the other hand, meant the employee felt blocked in some way from making such progress. Setbacks stood out on the worst days at work.”

After analyzing some 12,000 diary entries, Professor Amabile said she found that the negative effect of a setback at work on happiness was more than twice as strong as the positive effect of an event that signaled progress. And the power of a setback to increase frustration is over three times as strong as the power of progress to decrease frustration.

“This applies even to small events,” she said.

Learning from mistakes, missteps, bad experiences, etc., is so powerful because mistakes "make a deep imprint," in the words of Paul Schoemaker. The warm glow of success can cause us, by contrast, to soften and shrug off what we could have learned. Don't we want to use bad experiences to our greatest benefit?

It's not directly mentioned in the article, but I'll add that a sense of humor, especially with respect to oneself, is a significant help when it comes to accepting and learning from negative experiences.

Media mistake milestone: "This American Life" retracts a story on Apple

A milestone in the history of the media occurred last week. Ira Glass' radio program "This American Life" retracted an entire episode it had produced regarding Apple's supplier Foxconn and the working conditions in its factories in China. The episode in question relied heavily on the first-person account of Mike Daisey (creator of the monologue "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," an excerpt of which provided much of the material for the program). Glass and his team discovered, thanks to reporting from Marketplace's Rob Schmitz, that a number of the incidents Daisey presented as factual were fabricated.

The retraction itself wasn't the milestone. This was: rather than simply announce the error, apologize and move on, This American Life produced an entire new episode dedicated to the retraction, investigating the process that led them to make these errors and, finally, presenting what is actually known about Apple and Foxconn, in an effort to imprint the true story instead of the fabricated. Such an open investigation and discussion of a significant mistake is unprecedented, in my experience.

Some highlights:

1) The admission:

[Ira Glass:] At the time that we were fact-checking his story, we asked Mike for the contact information for the interpreter that he used when he was visiting China, who he calls Cathy in his monologue. We wanted to talk to her to confirm that the incidents that he described all happened as he describes them. And when we asked for her information, he told us, well, her real name wasn't Cathy. It was Anna.

And he had a cell phone number for her, but he said that when he tried the number these days, it doesn't work anymore. He said he had no way to reach her. And because the other things that Mike told us about Apple and about Foxconn seemed to check out, we saw no reason to doubt him, and we dropped this. We didn't try further to reach the translator. That was a mistake.

I can say now in retrospect that when Mike Daisey wouldn't give us contact information for his interpreter, we should have killed the story rather than run it. We never should have broadcast this story without talking to that woman.

2) On how the mistake impacted the show and public radio:

I should say I am not happy to have to come to you and tell you that something that we presented on the radio as factual is not factual. All of us in public radio stand together. And I have friends and colleagues on lots of other shows who, like us here at This American Life, work hard to do accurate, independent reporting week in, week out. I and my co-workers here at This American Life, we are not happy to have done anything to hurt the reputation of the journalism that happens on this radio station every day. So we want to be completely transparent about what we got wrong and what we now believe is the truth.

Papers like the New York Times regularly print corrections and retractions, but never (even in the case of an Editor's Note, the highest-profile correction the Times makes) does it feature the correction equal to the original. On the web page, corrections are signaled at the top of the page and then detailed below the piece.

News organizations have run juicy stories that later turned out to be fabricated since the very beginning. In the future, let's hope more organizations are as open and self-critical as This American Life was in this case.

Some other notable media fabrications:

Janet Cooke, Washington Post, 1981. (Cooke's story, "Jimmy's World," is here.)
Jayson Blair, New York Times, 2003

Peyton Manning going to Denver: "I have to go from now and make it the right decision"

In an interview on NFL Network with Peyton Manning, after his decision to sign with the Denver Broncos after 14 years with the Indianapolis Colts, said this:

This decision was hard.... I had to pick one [team]. I wanted to go to all of 'em at one point. But, like the other decisions I made in the past, I decided to make it and not look back. And to go from now and make it the right decision. I have to go to work to make it the right decision.

Showing a true sense of agency. If things don't work out in Denver, Manning won't blame anyone else. It's more likely, however, that he is successful - because he will work to make it so. He has taken ownership of the decision and the outcome.

Jerome Chazen from Liz Claiborne: "We allowed the growth potential to overtake the company"

This mistake story is from Knowledge@Wharton's interview with Liz Claiborne co-founder Jerome Chazen, author of "My Life at Liz Claiborne: How We Broke the Rules and Built the Largest Fashion Company in the World."

Knowledge@Wharton: What would you say your biggest mistake was running the company, or even before you became CEO, during that whole 30-year tenure?

Chazen: Well, with the benefit of hindsight, I would have worked harder to moderate our growth. I think we allowed the growth potential to overtake the company instead of us being in charge of it. It's a hard thing to explain. But you know, it was so exciting, for me anyway, to report better and better numbers, especially after we went public. I mean I loved it. I loved those quarterly [numbers] that were up 20% or 40%, whatever.

I think, looking back now, that I got carried away, that we should have done things more moderately. I very much appreciate, and I do mention in the book a couple of times, that the Ralph Lauren model was a much better model long range. He's still around and still cooking, and things are going well. Now of course he's primarily in the men's business, which is a much different business and in many ways a much easier business. But he balanced out. I wanted our company to eventually become very important in our own retail business. Unfortunately, we had grown so fast with the department stores and we were so locked in and dependent upon those people -- not only for the clothing we made, but for every other division in the company, including jewelry and fragrance and accessories and so on and so forth -- that we just couldn't move anymore. We couldn't make any moves.

Knowledge@Wharton: Too big, too fast.

Chazen: We did open some stores, but we were never able to be successful because, at that time, we were getting caught in the whole sale mentality of the department stores, which is another thing.... I tried very, very hard to stay out of those messes with the department stores, but it just became impossible.

Chazen vividly describes here what a seductive mistress growth can be. It was "exciting." He "loved" it. But at the end of the day, growth was a trap.

The company called Liz Claiborne will change its name in May 2012 to Fifth and Pacific. It owns the Juicy Couture, Lucky Jeans and Kate Spade brands. The Liz Claiborne brands have been retired.

Mistake Bank podcast: "The Wide Lens" author Ron Adner shares stories of innovation mistakes

I had the opportunity to interview Ron Adner, professor at the Tuck School of Business and author of "The Wide Lens: A New Strategy of Innovation." The book details the challenges with innovating when you are dependent on more than you and the end-customer - including intermediaries, co-innovators, etc., who influence the success of your new venture.

Ron shares a couple of great stories, but perhaps the most significant part of the interview is the discussion that happens after each story. One of the great benefits of sharing mistake stories is dialoguing with others about what happened, why, and how we can learn from it. I have found this sort of dialogue very helpful in my own learning, and I'm happy to share this neat example with everyone.

You can learn more about The Wide Lens at its website, where chapter 1 (in which Adner evaluates the Michelin story he relates in this podcast) is available to read for free.

Podcast:
Ron Adner, author of The Wide Lens, on innovation ecosystem mistakes (28 minutes)

0:30 - How did The Wide Lens come about?
2:30 - The Michelin mistake story
6:45 - Discussing the Michelin story
13:15 - The inhalable insulin mistake story
19:30 - Discussion: The value blueprint, leading/following, timing, etc.
24:10 - How "The Wide Lens" helps innovators

Game designer Scott Anderson: game failed because "we were driven by external rewards"

Another mistake story from the GDC 2012 "Failure Workshop." This was excerpted from Kris Graft's excellent writeup in Gamasutra, a gaming industry site:

Scott Anderson and his team were working on a puzzle/platformer game called Shadow Physics, a project that appeared at first to be set up for success, but eventually was abandoned.

"About eight months ago we lost our funding, and the game was cancelled," Anderson said. Shadow Physics was previously funded by Indie Fund.

The failure has since sunk in, and Anderson admitted, "The game was a great concept but it wasn't really a lot of fun...ever."

There were other various reasons why Shadow Physics failed. "We were driven by external rewards," such as fortune and fame, Anderson said, instead of a true passion for the project.

There were also problems with the game's tech, and the gameplay relied too much on the physics engine. He said the game was just not "tight," and there were unpredictable game systems.

"The game just didn't work," Anderson said. "We chased certain Braid mechanics a little too much," he added. He said at times there was too much "Braid envy" going on in the game design.

There were also issues with the development process, iteration was becoming expensive, and the hiring process was based on if they liked the person, rather than if he or she was a good fit.

Additionally, communication issues "were a big problem with the team in general." People wanted to avoid conflict, but then it became a "passive aggressive war zone," said Anderson.

Amir Rao of Supergiant Games: Users had "no idea what was happening" when using gardening feature

This mistake story from the GDC 2012 "Failure Workshop" was captured by Kris Graft of Gamasutra, a gaming industry site:

Next up for the [failure] workshop was Amir Rao of Supergiant Games. The studio did ship its first title, Bastion, to much success. But what's not known by most people is that it shipped without one big feature that failed.

Basiton had a rich art style, a unique reactive narrator, and, Rao said, "It was going to have a rich and exciting gardening feature."

The reasons for including this feature were clear for Rao. "Gardening is an aesthetic that everybody understands. ... We wanted to try and take that aesthetic ... and apply that to an action RPG, because that is something that we haven't seen before."

The studio spent a year working on the gardening feature, influenced by games like Viva Pinata, Harvest Moon, and even certain systems from Civilization Revolution.

Player would find seeds out in the world, bring them back to the hub called Bastion, put them in planters, water them, and wait to see what they would become. The problem was that players had "no idea what was happening," said Rao. "It's really hard to communicate the intermediate part of planting" that happens between burying the seed, and having the final plant.

"You know people understand a lot better than planting? A menu," Rao determined.

I empathize with Rao's disconnect with his users, and respect his recognition that the gardening feature wasn't working. It's easy for a product developer to fall in love with certain features, and hard to finally decide to take them out.

Jamie Cheng, game designer, on a failed effort: "We didn't have a conviction of what we wanted to do"

This mistake story from the GDC 2012 "Failure Workshop" was captured by Kris Graft of Gamasutra, a gaming industry site:

Jamie Cheng of Eets and Shank developer Klei Entertainment talked about his studio's failure -- an online game called Sugar Rush. The studio worked on it for three years, did the art style for the game five different times, held three closed betas, and was only two weeks away from a full ship. But it never shipped.

Cheng said the game was originally called Eets: Sugar Rush, and had marshmallows fighting one another. It was greenlit by Nexon in Vancouver.

The game gradually became a mish-mash of ideas from the game developers and ideas from the publisher. It became diluted, and the game didn't really know what it was supposed to be.

Impending failure became clearer when Nexon Vancouver totally shut down, and with that, the backend for the game was gone.

But the studio still didn't want to give up, so it tried to convert Sugar Rush to a game called Scrappers for consoles. But it still didn't ship.

"We didn't have a conviction of what we really wanted to do," said Cheng "...We didn't know [how to work with a publisher] as an independent [studio]."

Klei eventually created and successfully shipped Shank, a game made with a much clearer creative vision.

Linda Rottenberg of Endeavor: "Go Big or Go Home" sometimes means "Go Home"

This story by Linda Rottenberg, co-founder and CEO of Endeavor, an organization promoting entrepreneurship in emerging markets, is part of "Failure Chronicles," a section of the April 2011 "Failure Issue" of Harvard Business Review.

As the plane took off for New Delhi, my mind was still grounded in the intense board meeting I had just held in New York. It was 2007, and Endeavor, the organization I had cofounded a decade earlier to support high-impact entrepreneurs around the world, was expanding rapidly. We had offices in nearly a dozen developing countries, from Brazil to Turkey. But our board was agitating.

“Linda,” the directors said to me firmly, “we’ve been operating in emerging markets for 10 years. Why are we not in India?”

We were not in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies because I felt that India, with its thriving culture of entrepreneurship, was not the right market for us. Endeavor’s mission—to mentor young business leaders, to get them access to capital, to turn them into rock stars—had already landed in India. But the board made a compelling case, arguing that if Endeavor was serious about growth markets, we couldn’t ignore one of the biggest in the world—not to mention one in which many of our own entrepreneurs wished to expand.

Once I was on the ground, my resistance softened further. I had encouraging meetings with top business leaders in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Sure, India had a vibrant community of entrepreneurs, they told me, but more local innovators were needed. Within months, Endeavor had secured $1.5 million in committed funds—half the capital required to launch local operations—and three (out of the needed six) local business leaders were ready to join the board. At our annual gala, I announced the news: Endeavor India had arrived!

But so had everyone else, I soon realized. Silicon Valley’s premier VC firms were already active in India. The media were full of homegrown entrepreneurial success stories like Wipro and Infosys. Although we were off to a successful start, I feared the seeds of failure were already planted.

Still, I was reluctant to give up. I had faced this situation before. A decade earlier, Endeavor’s inaugural office, in Chile, had been struggling because of lackluster buy-in from the local business community. I decided to shut down the office. Six months later we reopened, having received calls from many business leaders there expressing their desire to work with us. Endeavor Chile swiftly became one of our top offices, led by an all-star board.

Was India another Chile, I wondered, needing only time to flourish? The answer was no. We had trouble recruiting additional local board members. Also, people were asking Endeavor to relax its “high impact” standards by focusing outside the capital cities, on the base of the pyramid. I feared mission drift. I needed to face reality: Failure was an option.

I soon announced that we would close Endeavor India.

As the leader of a fast-growing organization, I know the importance of setting an ambitious course of action—and stubbornly following it. I believe passion is a powerful guide. But the Law of India, to me, is: You can’t always will an outcome. You can’t always win. You just need to fail smart.

I often think of that plane ride to Delhi and of how important that experience has become to my understanding of entrepreneurship. One of my favorite business mantras is “Go big, or go home.” We talk a lot in business—and at Endeavor—about the first half of that equation, “Go big.”

But we need to spend a lot more time on the second half, “Go home.” Sometimes knowing when to shut down a failed initiative is as vital as knowing when to start one. Sometimes embracing failure is as important as toasting success.

This is a very difficult decision for entrepreneurs. Persistence is a critical success factor - but persistence in the pursuit of a failing objective is a drain on precious time and resources. The magic happens at that margin - between doubling down and going home. When do you decide it's time to "Go Home" on a new venture?

Game Developers Conference hosts a "Failure Workshop"

This news piece by Gamasutra, a gaming industry site, got my attention:

For the second year at GDC [the Game Developers Conference], game developers got together not to talk about their best practices or their successes, but instead about their failures....

Ron Carmel of World of Goo house 2D Boy hosted the panel, and opened by stressing the importance of sharing experiences of failure. If people don't talk about and share their failures, "We're missing out on 90 percent of our learning opportunities," Carmel said.

He talked about dispelling the "success myth," explaining that "the successes that you see usually come after a long string of failure."

Carmel is right. You don't read about the failures that predate a big hit. Instead, writers mine that success story for some formula they can sell to their readers about how to replicate this success. The game designers at this session know this isn't how it's done.

And we shouldn't be surprised that game designers are not afraid to fail and to learn from failure. Other posts on this site have reinforced that iterative learning is natural to gamers, as it should be to those who design games as well.

Gamasutra captured some great mistake stories from the session. We'll feature those in upcoming posts.

Daryl Morey of the Houston Rockets, on his mistake in waiving Jeremy Lin

On Bill Simmons' BS Report podcast, Daryl Morey, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets, discussed his team releasing Jeremy Lin before Lin joined the New York Knicks and became 2012's breakout basketball star.

Morey, in this clip, describes the difference between what he calls "Type I" error - his error of commission - and "Type II" error. Morey is guilty of a Type I error - he waived Lin when he should have kept the guard on the roster. Besides the Knicks and the Golden State Warriors (the team that drafted him), the other teams committed a "Type II" error - they never gave Lin a chance in the first place, despite each having had the opportunity to do so.

This is important. The Rockets and Morey got criticism for letting Lin get away. The other teams largely escaped criticism because they didn't even give him a chance. Who's the better decisionmaker here? Morey or his passive rivals?

Listen to the audio clip here: Daryl Morey of the Houston Rockets on Type 1 Error (1:38) [There is an embedded audio player you can access at the bottom of the page.]

Here's a precise statistical definition of Type I and Type II error. What Morey describes isn't exactly this, but I get his point.

Why journal your mistakes?

I am reading a Harvard Business School working paper, entitled "Learning From My Success and From Others' Failure: Evidence from Minimally-Invasive Cardiac Surgery." The key finding is right there in the title. We learn better from others' mistakes than from our own. This is largely due to the "self-attribution bias" that behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman discovered - in our limited perspective, we ascribe our successes to our abilities and efforts, while we blame failures on external circumstances. 

This means we by nature carry a large blind spot around with us--it's hard, and unnatural, to reflect on and scrutinize our own actions to look for areas of improvement. In fact, it can make us feel bad about ourselves - not a good situation for learning, no?

Here's where journaling comes in. When something goes awry, all you need to do is write it down. Classify it as a Mistake and move on. Then, weeks later, after the intensity and emotions of the moment have dissipated, you look back at it, think about it. What happened? Think about your role - recognize that mistakes and failures are owned by groups, but self-improvement is your task alone. (This is having a sense of agency.) What could you have done differently that could have affected the outcome? Next time your face a similar circumstance, how will you handle it?

Documenting and reflecting on mistakes isn't easy. It's a discipline that needs to be learned. But think about this: according to the Harvard paper, most people don't learn well from their own mistakes. If you can be one of the few that do, it puts you at a tremendous advantage. That advantage will create opportunities, and allow you to capitalize on them.

If you'd like to try a free journaling app that was created to aid in this process, sign up here.

A Post Mortem, even if you win

[This post first appeared in the Rocket Matter blog.]

I's customary, when you are in a competitive bidding process, to hold a post-mortem or an "after-action review" if you've lost. And this makes sense: lessons from failure make a deep imprint. Losing takes a psychological toll and causes us to seek not to repeat it. So the loss review is a natural outgrowth of this feeling – let’s look back on what we did that contributed to the loss and learn from it.

What happens when you win? Here’s what I’ve seen after winning a deal:

•       you bang a gong
•       you have a party
•       you talk about how smart and clever you were

Celebrating wins is essential and motivating, and you should definitely do that. But when the champagne bottles are empty and the euphoria has died down a bit, think for a minute. Did you do everything perfectly? 

“Of course not,” you say. “There are things to learn from every competition, win or lose.” And if you reflect on your win, you’ll realize that the victory was at least partially due to circumstances outside your own actions – the mistakes of your opponents, a sympathetic judge, a convenient venue, etc. You may in fact have won in spite of yourself.

If you only look back at the losses, you are discarding massive opportunities to learn.

Perhaps it’s time to start conducting win reviews. Here’s how:

1. A few weeks after the result is known, ask each person involved in the case to think about the entire process, from start to finish. Ask them to look for surprises. When were you surprised during the time we were working on the case? What happened? What would you do differently next time?
   
2. Gather everyone together in a meeting (2 hours should be plenty of time). Appoint someone who was not involved in the case to moderate the session. Record it if possible.
   
3. Acknowledge the victory and spend 10 minutes reliving the triumph. Then move into learning mode. 
   
4. Set the stage by discussing how much of winning and losing are events outside of your control. “You know, we had a few breaks in this case. If this or that had happened differently, we might have lost. Now, let’s think about what we did that next time we could do better and give ourselves an even better chance to win.”
   
5.  Ask each attendee to briefly describe one of their “surprises.” Only that person speaks; this is not a debate, or a competition. Go around the table a few times until you have a list of 10 or more things you’d do differently. [Make sure to listen carefully to the quiet folks; they will have great ideas that you hadn’t considered before.]
   
6. Use a voting method to select the top 3-5 items.
   
7. Spend 30 minutes discussing each of the top items from the vantage point of, “The next time we face this situation, what do we want to do instead?”
   
8. Document those findings and share with the entire company. 

It may be difficult to find the time to do a win review. Even harder is gathering the will to reflect on the past and learn from it. But if you want to be better than your opponents, you will make it happen.

In a New York Times interview, Katherine Hays, CEO of software company GenArts, provided the best reason why:

I learned as an athlete — I rowed for four years in college — that you have to be present in the moment, and you can’t be distracted by something you just did that was really good, or by the fact that you’re a little bit behind in a race. You can’t focus on what’s just happened because you can’t change it. That’s not to say we shouldn’t pause and congratulate ourselves, but you have to balance that with maintaining focus on what the next steps are. You learn as an athlete to say: “Great, we won that race, but what are the things we could have done better? Because we have a race next week.”

You too will have a “race next week.” How will you prepare? Let us know in the comments.

True Grit #2 - English girls' school tries a "failure week"

According to the BBC, the Wimbledon High School near London will hold a "failure week" in February to teach its high-performing students that it's better to try new things and fail at them than to play it safe and try to sidestep situations where failure is possible.

The headmistress, Heather Hanbury, said she wanted to show "it is completely acceptable and completely normal not to succeed at times in life."...

There will be workshops, assemblies, and activities for the girls, with parents and tutors joining in with tales of their own failures.

There will be YouTube clips of famous and successful people who have failed along the way and moved on.

The emphasis will be discussions on the merits of failure and on the negative side of trying too hard not to fail.

This is a perfect time to teach that learning and development are more important than 100% grades. My high school experience was prime time for the pursuit of grades rather than learning, which I find really annoying in hindsight (in other words, that was a mistake :).

The headmistress' thinking is reminiscent of the importance of "grit" - the ability to bounce back from failure promoted by the University of Pennsylvania's Angela Duckworth. I hope headmistress Hanbury lets the girls know that mistakes can open up new vistas and new opportunities, worlds of possibility, rather than the closet of "perfection or nothing."

NB: The Failure Week was held from February 6-10 and here are some of the learnings from it. My favorite quote: "We just lost in debating this week – we’ve been joking: is that what it’s about??"

If by "it" you mean developing a sense of humor around your fallibility, the answer is yes--that's what it's about.

[Hat tip to @brainology]

George Bernard Shaw - "A life spent making mistakes is...more useful"

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

via unitedearth.com.au

The Power of Confronting Your Own Weakness

I recently read a headline from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge that intrigued me: "Learning From My Success and From Others' Failure." It's a very important paper and I will be posting in more detail on it later, but what struck me immediately upon reading the abstract was the finding that learning from others' failure is easier than learning from one's own failures.

Then I read "The Crucible of Leadership" from the great Jerry Colonna as published in Fred Wilson's AVC blog. Among the many gifts of that post was a powerful story, which read in part:

Take as an example a client I worked with intensely over the last few weeks. She and a co-founder have been killing each other (okay, I have a flair for the overstatement…still, they have both been getting sick with a host of ailments—migraines and stomach problems). The arguments had gotten so bad that neither could stand to be in the same room with the other. Even I was exasperated. During one late night call, I asked my client to forget, for a moment, whether her co-founder was right or wrong. “I don’t care who’s right,” I said with my voice rising. “The only thing we have to focus on is what are you supposed to be learning from this.”

There was a long silence. I thought, “Okay. You’ve really pushed her too far. You and your woo-woo ‘lessons in the pain’ crap.” But then: alchemy. She opened up. “This is really shameful to admit,” she began, “but I know I’m a pain in the ass because I have to be right, all the time. I know it’s wrong but I can’t stop myself.”

And with that we had something to work with. I pressed her: Given this tendency, what do you really believe? What values do you hold? What kind of company do you want to build? And what kind of adult do you want to be?

Over the next few weeks, on guard for her need to be right, we carefully went to work changing her approach to the co-founder. For her, the crucible moment came in facing her shame, acknowledging who she really has been and as a result she got to choose how she wanted to manage and who she wanted to be.

We forge our truest identity by facing our fears, our prejudices, our passions, and the source of our aggression.

I would add to that last sentence "our weaknesses." Learning from mistakes doesn't only mean learning from others' mistakes. It means learning about ourselves, our deepest weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Is it harder to confront and take these lessons to heart? Of course. Jerry Colonna's client is a great example of that. But the rewards are manifold. The client is now able to confront this persistent and damaging situation with her partner, and can take this knowledge of herself into all her future interactions.

The lessons from our own failures "leave a deep imprint," but are also lessons that serve us the rest of our lives. Don't settle for only learning from others' mistakes. If you do, you're only halfway to where you need to get.

New York Giants and Jeremy Lin demonstrate how to accept and learn from mistakes

I'm still basking in the afterglow surrounding the Giants' recent Super Bowl win. A Sports Illustrated article mentioned something that might have helped develop the remarkable resiliency that characterized their late season and playoff performances. Here's a brief excerpt:

During the bye week following a 4-2 start, director of player development Charles Way invited fighter pilots from Afterburner Inc., a corporate training company, to address the team about the value of "debriefing" sessions. Pilots returning from missions build trust through sessions in which they sit in a room together, stripped of name and rank; each speaks openly about mistakes he made during the mission. Players also received a copy of a book by one of the pilots, James D. Murphy, the title of which expressed the ultimate goal: Flawless Execution.

Soon Manning and Tuck, respectively, were leading offensive and defensive debriefings the day after games. Coaches were not present. Meetings lasted from 20 minutes to an hour. "I wasn't coaching anybody," Manning says. "I was just coaching myself, looking at what I needed to do better and telling everybody. Then everybody would talk about what they needed to do to improve."

Says linebacker Mathias Kiwanuka, "There was a time there when we needed every single minute of [debriefing]. It wasn't about calling people out. It was an opportunity to see everybody hold themselves accountable. The big part of why we're here is that fingers don't get pointed. These kind of teams don't come along very often."

If accountability and execution characterized New York's undefeated run from 7--7, those qualities were beacons during the Super Bowl.

This practice recalls some of Robin Ely's great research on learning among oil-platform workers and Amy Edmondson's work on hospital nursing teams, as well as Justin Menkes writing on leadership. Learning and performance are enhanced when people are unafraid to share mistakes, when they look to themselves first ("owning their missteps") instead of blaming others.

In a similar vein, here's what Knicks sensation Jeremy Lin said in his postgame interview after hitting the game-winning shot against the Toronto Raptors: "I did a horrible job on Barbosa and Calderon... Shump did an unbelievable job... I let them get into a flow early, and that's on me. He bailed me out." Very little about his good performances, a lot about what his teammates did well, and what he can improve. Here's the interview:

Social app company Path apologizes for importing customer address books without asking

This week, there was a big to-do over the discovery that social-media startup Path had been uploading customers' address books without permission. The latest turn of events is an apology from CEO Dave Morin. It says, in part:

We are sorry.

We made a mistake. Over the last couple of days users brought to light an issue concerning how we handle your personal information on Path, specifically the transmission and storage of your phone contacts.

As our mission is to build the world’s first personal network, a trusted place for you to journal and share life with close friends and family, we take the storage and transmission of your personal information very, very seriously.

Through the feedback we’ve received from all of you, we now understand that the way we had designed our ‘Add Friends’ feature was wrong. We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts.

In the interest of complete transparency we want to clarify that the use of this information is limited to improving the quality of friend suggestions when you use the ‘Add Friends’ feature and to notify you when one of your contacts joins Path––nothing else. We always transmit this and any other information you share on Path to our servers over an encrypted connection. It is also stored securely on our servers using industry standard firewall technology.

Now, I much prefer the straightforward "We Are Sorry" at the top of the post, as opposed to "we are sorry if you were uncomfortable..." that comes later. Imagine that I insulted you, and you pushed back, and I said, "I'm sorry if you took my comments the wrong way." You would not consider that much of an apology.

Morin's apology sounds like that. A straightforward statement such as, "We are sorry that we used your contacts without permission" would have been more to the point.

This "sorry you were uncomfortable" apology reveals that the company thinks what it did was correct and justified, and only because it garnered bad publicity did they do anything about it. This says something about social web services like Path. They feel that they deserve access to your information, and would prefer to do it without asking, unless people find out about it. I'll try to remember that when I get the next signup request for a new service.

What do you think? Is this a heartfelt apology? Does Path even feel they made a mistake?

A thought on due diligence

The following was posted as a comment to the old Ning Mistake Bank site. It's part of that site's archive but I no longer know who wrote it. Whoever it was, they were pretty wise:

Several of the stories posted on the site are on lack of due diligence causing problems later. However, we rarely look back on situations where we did too much due diligence. What opportunities did we not take because we looked too closely at them? Might some of them turned out great? I think circumstances influence our level of due diligence, especially when we're self-employed. When you need that next gig, or really want to make a certain deal, our brains look at the bright side and muffle our skeptical side. Sometimes that causes us problems, and sometimes it turns out great.

By the way, if you were the person who posted it and would like attribution, I'm happy to give that to you. Post a comment and I'll get in touch with you.

...and after rereading this post, it occurs to me that a tool that addresses this is possible. Something like an "reverse due diligence" - looking at the absolute worst case outcome of a decision, and comparing it to the possible upside, as a rationale for going ahead with the decision.

VC Fred Wilson: "Wear failures as a badge of honor"

Fred Wilson's A VC blog is a great source of information on investing and venture capital. And it's one of the few blogs where the comments are consistently a source of great insight. In 2009 Fred posted a story and thoughts on the topic of failure:

Barack Obama said this in his "back to school speech":

you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time

That's so true. It took me a while to learn that lesson.

When I first started out in the venture capital business, I was afraid to make a mistake. Once I started investing and taking board seats myself, I worked super hard to avoid losing money. I went for almost a decade without making a losing investment.

But then in the aftermath of the internet bubble, the wheels came off of the bus. We wrote off close to twenty investments in the span of two years from late 2000 to late 2002. It was devastating on many levels.

But when I look back on my career, it is not the successes that I think back on most. It is the failures, and particularly those two years when everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

When Brad and I started Union Square Ventures in 2003, we laid out a roadmap for what kind of firm we wanted to create, what kind of investments we'd make, and how we thought the Internet was going to evolve. That work was largely a result of the lessons we both had learned in the aftermath of the bubble.

I think embracing failure is one of the things that makes this country such a great place to do business in. In many parts of the world, if you fail once, you are done. People won't touch you with a ten foot pole. But here in the US, it's almost a badge of honor. And our President explains why.

When we met with entrepreneurs, I'm always interested in their failures. And most people have them, you just have to dig a bit to find them. If someone has failed and taken the time to learn from it, I think that's a big positive. It makes us even more excited to back them the next time.

So don't hide your failures. Wear them as a badge of honor. And most of all, learn from them.