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“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett
Failure is a key ingredient for innovation. Failure is a mindset and a process. One of the challenges for innovation is to enable failure and learn from it.
Professor Ghosh from the Harvard Business School on failure and learning from it:
Because our brains conspire against us, learning from failure requires discipline. The Army knows something about discipline, so it shouldn’t surprise us that they do a great job with learning from failure. After every engagement, an army unit runs what’s called an “After-Action Review.” The team asks four simple questions: What was our objective? What happened? Why did it happen? What do we do next?
Great entrepreneurs are likewise disciplined about learning from failure. They rely on the scientific method, formulating hypotheses about their new business and structuring experiments to test those hypotheses. They expect that many of these tests will fail. Thomas Edison knew this when he invented the light bulb. He famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”