Fast Failure: The Secret to Success

Surveying the business landscape over the past five years makes me especially optimistic about growth. Strangely, that’s because so many U.S. businesses are failing—but failing successfully. As unexpected as that sounds, the best organizations and business leaders are now adept at failing and then quickly applying lessons learned from those misfires to fuel future successes. 

Today’s problems are incredibly complex. Few can be solved on the first try. But we find that clients who seek to understand what does and does not work ultimately make more confident, grounded decisions.

Kelley Buchanan, PwC’s managing director for insurance advisory, and I spoke yesterday at the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation’s Women in Insurance Forum in Chicago. Our theme was the frontiers of the future, and a big part of our discussion focused on failing fast and learning faster to take advantage of new opportunities.

The insurance industry focuses on mitigating risk, so the notion of failing in order to succeed does not come naturally, but the industry increasingly recognizes that the way forward requires a cultural shift. I see that transformation beginning as insurance industry leaders increasingly focus on tech-driven innovation.

For example, insurers are contemplating how drone technology might be integrated into claim adjustment. Sending drones to record and instantly transmit an aerial view holds great promise, particularly in situations where sending an adjuster to a remote or dangerous location would be too costly, risky, or time-consuming. Google Glass is another exciting innovation to increase adjustor efficiency. Outfitting a junior adjustor with Google Glass, while senior talent fields multiple claims at a command center, will significantly streamline the industry.

Innovative thinking is also on the rise in insurance marketing. With the help of technology, insurance companies have the opportunity to form new partnerships outside the industry and to bring in fresh perspectives in consumer packaging. Just think—we can now purchase life insurance in a box at Walmart.

To be clear, the type of trial and failure I am applauding is not about putting an entire company at risk. It’s about creating an open environment where today’s business people can learn from mistakes, experiment and innovate without the stigma often associated with failing.

Cloud technology, for example, facilitates fast failure. By speeding up the availability of applications and infrastructure and decreasing costs, the cloud allows innovators to try out more ideas more quickly. Because cloud technology enables analysis of huge quantities of data, ideas that aren’t working can be quickly identified and closed out while investment continues in areas that are performing well. In social media and web services, for example, mining vast amounts of customer data for timely and rapid feedback is essential to making decisions about next steps.

Change is occurring at unprecedented speeds, and failure also needs to be rapid. Whether learning simply to use a new app or implementing new technological systems, most of us don’t get it right the first time. Ultimately, a willingness to try, fail, and learn creates opportunities for organizations and individuals ready to innovate. An organization that focuses on quickly and efficiently extracting lessons learned from failures, instead of pointing fingers, is well-equipped to lead in real time.

Posted by:Timothy F. Ryan