i3 - May/June 2019 - 46

Business
By Jake Sigal
A DV I C E FO R E N T R E P R E N E U RS

Use 'Fail Bricks' to Build Walls of Success

 I 

t's something I hear
way too often: "We
prefer to call failure
a learning experience."

I believe that to truly achieve innovative breakthroughs, failure needs to be
called what it is. And failing for a purpose is more noble than learning. In
small business tech, we go for it and
never look back.
In doing so, we use failures like bricks
in a wall to not only build success, but to
strengthen our projects, our products
and even our company.

Creating space for innovation

Innovation and improvement opportunities are in every area of the business
beyond research and development.
That includes HR and operations.
Don't be afraid to try (or even pilot)
new ideas, concepts or processes and to
let your staff know why you are

changing things up. At Tome, we have
lab day once a month, which is our safe
space where everyone shuts down normal work and goes out to learn or try
new things. We encourage team members to push personal technical limits,
without fear of the consequences of
failure. In our client projects, we often
have a discovery phase where we test
new technologies. Failure is not only
tolerated, it's expected. We use it to
decommission certain techs while others are prioritized.

Define Success and Failure Early

The worst thing in tech are products,
technologies or businesses that hang
around without ever succeeding or
failing. I call these zombies. These
need to be avoided at all costs by
defining success and failure early, typically before even starting a project.
Find a performance metric that is
without question a failure, one that
everyone agrees with. It may not be

what you want, but at least you have a
clear line. Success can also be tricky
as you not only need to make money
and meet a technical performance
goal, but you also need to be in front
of your competitors.

Sharing Failure

Sharing and celebrating failure is the
only way to show your team you truly
expect and embrace failure. Ben &
Jerry's has a flavor graveyard for flavors
that have failed or "passed away." We
have a fail brick with our logo that is
earned. Whenever anyone fails, we post
a message on Slack and show off the
brick on our desks as a badge of honor.
It's common culture to ask, "How'd
you get the fail brick?" We also have a
"fail of the month" award to present at
the monthly staff meeting, which is
almost as popular as our employee of
the month award. Find your own way
to allow, define and share your failures
to accelerate your next big idea.

Don't be afraid to try new ideas,
concepts or processes and to let your

Jamie Jones/Getty Images

staff know why you are changing things up.

46

MAY/JUNE 2019

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i3 - May/June 2019

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