If your company is uncomfortable with failure, show them this:

True story: I recently met​ a former design leader for a $100B business that you’ve certainly heard of.

I asked her how many experiments they run per week, and she said “a thousand.”

“Per week?” I clarified, “One THOUSAND per week?”

“Yep.”

“Wow. And how many of them are successful?”

“Nine percent.”

She didn’t hesitate.

“Nine percent?” I repeated, stunned.

“Yep.”

That means one of the world’s most successful companies is wrong 91% of the time.

That’s not an anomaly – it’s the standard in fast-growth tech companies.

Nobody likes failing, and it’s no fun to discuss our failures.

But if you’re not failing, you’re not learning. And if you stop learning, sooner or later, you’ll stop earning.

What about a little startup?

Maybe you can’t run 1,000 tests per week, but most startups aren’t even running 10. And when they do experiment, they expect success rates that are wildly unrealistic.

This expectation creates a paralysing fear of failure, causing teams to: Run fewer experiments, take fewer risks, miss critical learnings, and fall behind faster bolder competitors.

Simple next steps:

Here’s three leadership moves that can shift your team’s attitude towards failure:

1. Be obviously imperfect: Talk about your own mistakes, every week. Start with the ones you’re still a little embarrassed about. You’ll be stunned what a bit of authentic vulnerability does for your team’s engagement levels.

2. Reframe your ideas: Present them as hypotheses. Instead of saying “do X” say “My hypothesis is… and we can test it quickly by…”

3. Find your truth-tellers: There are people in your team who aren’t afraid to speak up. Give them explicit permission to challenge you with data and customer insights. They’re your secret weapon against blind spots.

How we can help.

We work directly with teams to help them adopt a systematic approach to experimentation and growth. You’ll increase your testing velocity, and focus on fewer bigger opportunities. Past participants have grown 10X or more off the back of the program. Details here.

Acknowledgments: Huge thanks to that aforementioned design leader, Erin Weigel!

I hope this helps!