Failing With Style

I had a brainstorm on Tuesday, and asked to present it to staff for Wednesday. Approved and given a 15 minutes slot, I went gung-ho - extolling the virtues of a particular piece of software I’ve been evangelizing of late - as the new hotness. Gone, (gone!) are the days of the old tiredness, this new thing, I tell thee, will change your life around. It’s the new hotness.

Understand? New hotness good. And in fairness, this particular bit of software is actually pretty good. Otherwise I wouldn’t be all gung-ho about it. But I overlooked one important missing feature in the app I wanted to ditch.

And then a colleague asked whether or not it had one particular feature. One that, although I didn’t consider essential, some staff obviously did (which is fair enough). All it took was that to take the wind out of my sails and admit defeat.

Getting angry, moody and blamestorming is easy. And I try not to do any of those things anymore - because it’s not my colleague’s fault for pointing out the obvious. If I can’t trust them to point out things to me, then I, well, I can’t trust them at all. So I’ve learned that when you fail, do your utmost to fail as spectacularly as possible, and with a smile on your face. Which I’m confident I pulled off.

20:20

• No matter how clever your idea, consult as wide as possible. This obviously means going beyond your boss and talking it through with users. Not making excuses, but this can be easy to overlook when you’re a one-man show.
• When your idea falls apart in front of you, do not continue going through your slides. Stop and talk to your audience. Even if you’re using a pop-culture reference to explain your hatred of printers. You’ve essentially burned that deck.
• People need to see you fail. More importantly, you need to let people see you fail.
• Most importantly, failure can be a catalyzing agent of change in helping you get un-stuck from your ways

I’m actually more determined now to find a way to get that feature in to the software, even if it means pestering the developers, trawling forums or even coding an extension myself. Driven.

And that means that failure can often be a Good Thing ™.