Odds are your innovation efforts will fail. Bummer. Big, big bummer.
It's tough to bring something new in to the world. Your chances of survival improve with a process informed by design thinking, but it's very likely some key factor -- across desirability, viability, or feasibility -- will not quite be there, and things will go pear-shaped.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to win, to make things happen. Quite the opposite: because the odds are so low, it means working even harder, pushing as much as you can to get things right. I don't know about you, but I really hate failing. It feels bad when it happens from a big-picture point of view; I have no problem with a prototype failing (that's a good thing, per Raney's Corollary), but I loathe the idea of something failing at a systemic level. Yuck.
But acknowledging that failure is a likely outcome enables us -- if we work with the end in mind -- to make a leap to a more productive state of being. That state of mind is the focus of Principle 14.
This is number 13 in a series of 21 principles of innovation. Your feedback, ideas, and comments are greatly appreciated.
Hey Diego:
I love this one. We just had a big mistake on our team yesterday and everyone felt pretty badly about it. It was important for us to move forward and learn from it, and I think we will within the team, but I found myself wondering about the "reputation risk" we face when making mistakes in more distant relationships. I think over time people see a pattern of mistake, recover, win; but how do we make sure this doesn't turn into mistake, distrust, lose?
Posted by: John Foster | 08 May 2009 at 11:21 AM