Author: Jurgen Appelo

"Let's celebrate failure!"

"Create a safe-to-fail environment."

"Fail fast, fail early, fail often."

"You only fail when you give up."

"Let's fail forward!"

I've been part of the agile community for fifteen years, and I think I've heard every possible variant of the importance of failure meme that you can imagine. For sure, I contributed to this myself with the Celebration Grid and some of my earlier writings.

But I noticed an increased dislike of the word fail.

Did I fail when a good habit goes wrong in an unexpected way?

Did I really fail when I learned from a mistake with a bad outcome?

Did an experiment fail when it was only the tenth of more than a hundred tests?

Now that I think of it, I failed many times in my life but often not in the ways that I had expected.

I failed when I invested far too much money in a startup that did not become the success that I had imagined. I certainly learned a lot from this experience, and I cherish those learnings because I paid so much for them. But I probably could have learned the same things far cheaper. My failure was that the experiment was too expensive.

I failed when I relied on my eyes while trying to run in the night. Twice in the same week, I tripped over objects in the darkness, and I painfully damaged both knees with permanent scars as a result. Indeed, I learned that I enjoy running in the dark, but since my double accident, I wear a headlight. My failure was that the experiment was too risky.

I failed when, many years ago, I tried developing a software program for two years without showing it to any users or customers. I enjoyed the process far too much, and I learned that I could do everything myself. Sadly, it appeared that the market had no appetite for my product. My failure was that the experiment took too long.

And then, there are things I tried that led to nothing. Like the many times I agreed to a request that I didn't like and then found that I was stuck in a commitment I hated. I already knew I wasn't going to like the work. What was the point in even trying? Did I hope that this time things would be different? My failure was that I learned nothing.

In other words, I see the meaning of failure a bit differently these days.

Outcomes of experiments are good or bad, positive or negative. They are not successes and failures. We succeed when an experiment is cheap, safe, and fast and only when we learn something valuable.

Here, I improved the slogans:

“Celebrate trying and learning, not failure.“

“Make environments safe-to-try, not safe-to-fail.”

“Try fast, try early, try often, and try safely.”

“You only fail when you waste your money, health, or time.”

“You fail when you stop trying and learned nothing.”

p.s. In the Celebration Grid, change Success and Failure into Positive and Negative, and you will be fine.