Failure Analysis

Failure is a fact of life. Things fail all the time. People get fired. Jobs don't get done. Things fail part. Teams lose. Objects break. Groups don't reach their intended targets. Failure analysis is simply analyzing data to understand why things have failed and what you can do about it. It's only a big deal if you let it be a big deal. You learn a lot more from failures than from successes.

Virtually every successful product was born of failure. Quicken was born of a prior product that didn't work. Wikipedia rose out of the ashes of Nupedia. Ted Turner failed to get into Harvard. Microsoft failed a couple of times and had to get resurrected.

There's a story allegedly about Edison, the American inventor who really started General Electric. He told someone at a party he'd run 500 experiments trying to get the light bulb to work but hadn't yet. The person listened and said, "Isn't that a waste of time?" Edison allegedly looked at him blankly and said, "Not at all. I have found 500 ways not to make a light bulb."

I don't know whether that story is true or not, but it's instructive. Failure can be good if the person who fail treat it as a learning experience. Why did something fail (i.e. not meet goals)? Then correct the mistakes and get in there again.

Many people try repeatedly to smoking and fail. We call those practice attempts.

The key to learning from failure is to write down what you want to accomplish ahead of time, how you want to accomplish it, and how you'll know whether it's working or not, what information you need to collect so that you'll know and how you're going to collect the information and how long you'll run the experiment. Then implement the project, collect the data, and at the end of it measure how you did against goal. If you exceeded goal, you were successful. If you failed, that is didn't at least meet goal, you need to analyze your data to understand why your effort failed.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.