What "Fail Fast, Move On" stands for

There's some confusion as to what "Fail Fast" means - it's caused some disturbance in the force. Let me give you my perspective. 

I'm going to use a business example for illustration. The message won't change if you apply the ideas to a product, a way of working - or even just a task.

The Fail Fast Move On Philosophy

Of course, we would like to maximize our probability of success. But - sometimes, we just can't know.

Let us use a restaurant as a showcase: I haven't seen any restaurant owner ever who opened a deli in order to go broke. And yet, almost 90% of restaurants don't survive their first year. Worse yet: the average restaurant owner loses at least $50k on the ordeal. Which, by the way, is the reason why I haven't opened a restaurant. For me, the upfront investment plus bound capacity (it's a pretty taxing job) isn't in sound relationship to possible benefits. But I digress ... but only slightly.

Fail Fast

During the "Fail Fast" stage, we start by figuring out what we're trying to do, what we know and what the unknowns and risks are. We exhibit a healthy skepticism of facts, for example, "Do we really know people in this part of town like Sushi?" and ask critical questions, such as, "What will happen if they don't?" We can then classify how much we're risking in case our assumptions turn sour. That gives us an analyzed, itemized list of risks which could make our endeavour fail.

Experiment

With our risk list, we propose a counter to our business idea, and we try to prove that the counter is false:

Returning to our sushi example, "We will offer a piece of Sushi to 100 pedestrians and ask them whether they'd visit a Sushi bar offering the same level of quality. [Counter:] Fewer than 10 positive answers mean that there's not enough interest in Sushi here."

Next, we're not even going to try to open a Sushi bar: all we want to do is disprove the pessimistic notion of an empty Sushi, our key risk of failure.  (We could still be wrong - but now we know that there's a possibility of being right.)

We're not trying to succeed, we're trying to rule out predictable failure.

If our counter-experiment succeeds, we just saved all followup effort: Why should we rent a facility, purchase decoration and cutlery, hire a cook and waiters - if we already know that we won't have enough customers? When we learned that we can't deal with known challenges, we need to change our goal and backtrack.

If we succeeded at failing the counter-experiment (yes, that's a double negative!) - we can proceed further.

Move On

In our restaurant example, we know that 90% of restaunts fail, and we'd like to be in the 10% that don't (like everyone opening one of the failing 90% of restaurants.) But: when we can't, we definitely don't want to be lose some $50k+ on the attempt. Hence, we move step by step, keeping the cost of each step low, and accept that everything we invested up to this step is money lost. We're not trying to recoup it - especially not by investing more in order to get some of it back.

"Moving on" means that everything we invested up to this point is "sunk cost" - investments we will never recover. Sunk cost hurts, and it makes us uncomfortable. Yet, there's something worse than sunk cost: "Throwing the good money after the bad."

In order to practice "Move On," we avoid hedging our bets by binding unnecessary assets, so that we have less pain when discarding them.

Moving on

Moving on requires us to let go of what we invested.

The 3 Steps of Fail Fast, Move On

Applying Fail Fast, Move On goes far beyond validating a business idea - it goes for any idea, and thus is all-encompassing for all creative work. Fail Fast, Move On could be considered a 3-step process:

1. Pull risk forward
2. Rigorously inspect and adapt
3. Minimize and write off sunk cost

That, of course, doesn't mean that we either:

• Generate unnecessary risk by negligence or unprofessionalism.
• Act without a prediction to validate.
• Waste our energy on doing things we know we could do smarter. 

To the contrary - "Fail Fast, Move On" is the notion of avoiding these three antipatterns by systematically eliminating failure points.

Proper "Fail Fast, Move On" saves you energy and maximizes your opportunity of success.

You can learn more about succeeding with "Fail Fast, Move On" in my Lean Startup lasses.

Feel free to set up an appointment with me using the PAYL coaching mechanism (on the left) to discover more.