I was watching a video of Jonathan Smart talk about his excellent book Sooner Safer Happier and something he said jumped out at me:
“We want intelligent failure”
Intelligent failure, he explains, is a failure that is:
- Quick
- Cheap
- Unique
Failure is not intelligent if you have spent a lot of time and money and/or you have made the same mistake several times already (doh!).
This is a great concept – making a mistake is not bad as long as we do it quickly, cheaply, learn from it and alter our approach next time. In fact, in her book, The Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson suggests companies should actively seek to make mistakes in order to use the lessons learnt to make strategic decisions.
Agile and failure
Guess what? Scrum and the general Agile methodology provide the tools to ‘fail intelligently’ in the inspect and adapt principle!
An iteration retrospective provides the opportunity to identify where failures have occurred, learn from them and adapt ways of working accordingly.
The next time you do a retrospective, ask the team where they have failed specifically rather than the usual Start, Stop or Continue topics. Why not ask the team to identify some experiments they can do which are likely to fail so that lessons can be learnt quickly and can be used to make decision on how to continue the work.
I would suggest that you also broaden it to be company-wide and ask the management team to do the same. Failure is not negative when it can be used to drive the company forward.
Further Reading
If you are interested in reading a bit more on this topic, these two books and in-depth article would be a great place to start:
The Right Kind of Wrong
Amy Edmondson’s book, The Right Kind of Wrong is recommended by Jonathan Smart and is an excellent book on business practice, which I promise I won’t fail in finishing.
Amy describes how leaders should create a culture that supports healthy risk-taking. Leaders should model transparency about their own failures and create an environment that values honest discussions about mistakes. This creates psychological safety which will enable using failure as a step toward growth.
Nurturing innovation through intelligent failure: The art of failing on purpose
This in-depth article describes how traditional failure is viewed as an unfortunate outcome that organizations either learn to live with or try to avoid. The authors, Narduzzo and Forrer, argue that there’s an alternative way to view failure: intelligent failure, failure that is designed and executed intentionally. This approach allows organizations to explore unknowns, test unvalidated assumptions and learn what to do next.
Narduzzo and Forrer propose the following systematic model for intelligent failure:
- Identify Assumptions – Start by questioning the assumptions behind your current knowledge. Which ideas, technologies, or beliefs are you taking for granted?
- Design the Experiment – Structure an experiment that will either validate or challenge these assumptions. The key here is to design it so that failure is a real possibility—this means avoiding low-stakes, “safe” experiments.
- Learn from the Outcome – Whether the experiment succeeds or fails, it generates valuable insights. If it succeeds, you confirm the current understanding. If it fails, you gain insight into why the existing knowledge or assumptions might be flawed, opening up new perspectives.
- Revise Knowledge Systems – Use these insights to update and improve the organization’s knowledge base, allowing it to adapt and prepare for further experimentation.
Sooner Safe Happier – Antipatterns and patterns for business agility
I mentioned this book at the top of the blog post. Written by Jonathan Smart, it is one of the business books I most frequently refer back to.
Smart describes a series of patterns and anti patterns which he has learnt from implementing the Agile Methodology in over 40 organisations.
Pragmatic Agile 