Fail Fast, Fail Often

Recently Jeff Bezos’ net worth surpassed 100 billion. Not bad for a guy who says it is his job to fail often. In an interview with Henry Blodget, CEO of Business Insider, Bezos shares, “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.” He stresses that for a company to have long-term sustainability, not just survive, they need to be constantly experimenting and be willing to fail. He says, “One of my jobs is to encourage people to be bold. It’s incredibly hard. Experiments are, by their very nature, prone to failure. A few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.”

Business guru Tom Peters says, “I’d rather reward spectacular failures than reward mediocre accomplishments.” What are you doing to encourage your people and yourself to see what is possible? You have to create a risk taking culture, and you do that by constantly experimenting. No one did this more effectively than Steve Jobs building Apple. Great leaders encourage experimentation and risk taking. Because of this, their people don’t fear failure. “The only way to come up with something new, something world changing, is to think outside of the constraints everyone else has,” said Jobs. “You have to think outside of the artificial limits everyone else has already set.”

Every industry has an Uber coming. In his recent article How To Avoid Disruption, James Caan shares how you can take steps to prepare for the inevitable. “Invest in a team whose primary focus is innovation. This team should be full of people with a startup mentality, who will question your processes and make you think differently.”

Epiphanies rarely occur in familiar surroundings. The key to “thinking differently” is to perceive things differently, through the lens of a revolutionary. And to see things through this lens, you must force your brain to make connections it otherwise would have missed. It sounds difficult, but there are simple ways to get the creative juices flowing. Every Fridayafternoon set aside two hours for Xperience 2022 meetings. Calling it Xperience 2022 allows your employees to not focus on the “how” and instead focus on the “why,” “what if,” and “why not.” Encourage crazy ideas focusing on what your Customer Experience can look like by the year 2022­­-your product, services, and ease of doing business.

You don’t have to wait until 2022 to roll out these ideas. You can easily take the best ideas that come from your Xperience 2022 brainstorming sessions and roll them out in safe beta test environments, e.g., in just one department, location or one Customer facing employee for a month. By limiting your new concept to a department, location, or employee, it allows you to test it out in a controlled environment, track the results, make necessary changes needed to the idea, and have proof of the success of the project. This will help you sell it to the rest of the organization when it is ready to be launched company wide.

Here are some examples of how to do soft rollouts in small ways:

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