Do we achieve better results by failing fast or having sheer bloody minded determination to keep going?

It must surely be one of the great business platitudes of the 21st century - the endlessly repeated 'fail fast' that is trotted out when talking about startups, new services or getting original ideas off the ground.

It all makes great sense when put on a screen in a conference, or explained by an ebullient consultant running a co-creation workshop. The logic is great: get an MVP out there, learn from what doesn't work, admit failures, and try again. Yet, the reality is that one so rarely sees this actually occurring. Of course there are real world examples, and one tends to see the same ones on those powerpoint slides in the conference. But if anyone has actually tried to follow this approach, the simple logic of 'fail fast' never seems to pan out.

Over the last few years I've found myself mulling over why this should be the case.

A critical difficulty for the 'fail fast' philosophy is just the plain, downright human emotional thing that none of us are really great fans of losing. If this wasn't the case then we just wouldn't enjoy playing games. We play games because we like the challenge of trying to win – in fact games could be thought of as artificial constructions where we create opportunities to experience winning, even if that winning has no real social consequence at all.

As well as the emotional dislike of losing, games also reveal a weakness in the practical application of 'fail fast' in terms of learning. If we applied the 'fail fast' approach to game playing one would say 'play this game quickly, and as soon as you think you are not doing very well, quit and start again'. But is this how we play games? Most of us will hang in there with that game of Monopoly and hope our fortunes will change. And the reality is that fortunes do change, and near bankruptcy might switch to dominating the game when you finally get that expensive set completed. Indeed, the rapid quitting of a game would deprive us of the many learnings that the game can provide on the vicissitudes of fortune.

There's a few parallels with business. When is the right time to quit? When is the right time to say "we've learnt all that we needed to have learned from this and we should now try a new approach"? It's a very difficult thing to decide. With hindsight one can look back and say "I was too optimistic, I should have changed tact much earlier". But then there's many counter cases where sheer bloody minded determination to push on have also delivered results. How does one know which approach is the right one?

There's also another related problem with business. Sometimes you just can't know whether something truly works unless it scales. In the digital space we are obsessed with the astonishing exponential curves shown by the mega-corporates such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc, etc. Yet what's interesting is that although we focus on the sudden rise of these services, what we don't pay attention to is the many many years beforehand where these services were sticking to their belief and where they had no clear evidence that the future success we focus on now was actually going to happen.

Did they 'fail fast' or did they just keep on playing the game, learning more, until they knew enough so that they could transform themselves into the successes they are now?

For most success stories what we will see is that they had deep enough pockets to allow them to continue playing and learning from the game. I remember vividly in the dot com crash of the 2000's how web services (indeed even the internet itself!) were written off by the press. And most did fairly rapidly disappear. But services such as Amazon, backed by the dogged determinism of large sums of cash, kept on going, and the next time the press were talking about it, it had become a dominant player in the market.

So should we replace the mantra 'fail fast' with 'fail slowly'? Or rather: 'stick with your idea long enough so as to be able to properly learn which elements work and which do not.'

Thinking about everything within the context of ‘fail slowly’ strikes me as a way to combine learning with the sheer bloody minded determination required for business.

Firstly, it helps soften the dynamics of human rivalries. ‘Fail fast’ is an approach that will often prioritise knee jerk reactions and one upmanship. If we all know that ideas are to be given proper time to develop, it permits us to step back, look objectively at the data, and build insightful responses.

Secondly it helps us counter a cultural problem – the modern obsession with the idea that the world is changing fast and that if success is not quickly achieved, the idea is no longer valid.

This obsession conflates technological change with changes to human needs. Technology may change fast, but human need does not. Social media is basically just an extension of gossip. Search is an extension of needing to find something. The striking thing about modern digital technologies is that they serve very simple, fundamental needs – but modern capitalism so often focuses on change it forgets the underlying continuity. This is a cultural problem that is difficult to counter.

The ‘fail slowly’ approach allows us to see that new ideas are 'not just for Christmas'. They take proper time to evolve and to really know whether it works or not. It basically says ‘Don’t Panic’.

Most of us don't have access to deep pockets and it’s difficult not to escape the panic as new ideas don’t deliver the expected results. Fortunately the modern world is providing us with an alternative to deep pockets – and that is the rising collection of 'low-code' tools. These permit the development of new services at a much lower cost than was previously possible, and as a consequence make it more likely that an idea can have the required longevity to really test it out and improve it.

Over the next few months, I'm aiming to write a few practical guides on how to use these new tools, and hopefully with that help more people pursue the exploration of an idea that would have otherwise not been possible.