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The celebration of failure has become a tired, counterproductive meme.

Sure, the tension involved in celebrating something normally thought to be bad gets your attention. It’s also a way to get people out of their comfort zone. So cheers for that.

But, really, we actually want to succeed and the more I read about failing forward, failing your way to success, and not being able to succeed without failing, the more I think the word does us a disservice on several levels. For starters, failure, it’s important to remember, is a broad umbrella. On the positive side, the one that’s worthy of fetishizing, it includes things that happened not to work. They didn’t fail so much as the client didn’t buy it, the market wasn’t ready for it, it was ahead of its time, or it was a good idea but not popular enough to be profitable. On the negative, however, failure also includes (and originally meant) screw-ups, incompetence, miscalculations, and arrogant dilettantism masquerading as expertise.

The problem is that the word failure doesn’t contain within it the means for evaluating good ones and bad ones. Failure doesn’t have an internal quality metric in its meaning that helps us identify the ones that actually advance the work and ones that should result in heads being knocked, going back to the drawing board, hitting the books, or putting together a new team.

Celebrating failure doesn’t help us increase our likelihood of doing quality work so much as it increases our chances of stumbling into it. By celebrating failure, we encourage peolpe and teams to try more, and more risky, ideas. But we don’t encourage people to focus on craft, execution, or a notion of quality. For some cultures, this might be good. If you’re in an environment that is so stale and idea-less that no one ever goes beyond the obvious, than you may need that jolt. But, in an environment that is already supposed to be about creativity, innovation, and design, you’re probably dumbing the place down. By talking about failure, rather than iteration and revving, we’re not advancing design thinking so much as inflating attitude. The word failure doesn’t have enough oomph in it to get people thinking.

Worst of all, I think, celebrating failure gives teams and people easy outs when something doesn’t go well. Since failure doesn’t contain a quality metric we have trouble describing what constitutes a useful failure. Most conversations about failure assume that everyone knows the actual complete screw-ups (do we really?) but don’t help identify the earnest, but ultimately wasteful, failures. As a result, when we fail, it’s easy to describe one’s self as taking a shot and missing but then celebrate the taking of the shot anyway. Rather than critique something to find out what the hell went wrong or, more productively, what do we do better, celebrating a failure implies that things were fine, it just didn’t work out.

To be clear, I think we should promote the taking of risks. I absolutely believe that the quality of an idea — its originality, elegance, or efficiency in solving a problem or doing something new and wonderful — should be celebrated even if the product ultimately doesn’t succeed in the marketplace or isn’t approved by the client. (I also think it would be an interesting exercise to see if celebrants of failure in the design world are willing to go so far as to call the Segway, Zune, and the XO successful failures.) But I think we should celebrate failure in a very different way: by calling it iteration, critique and refinement. Better yet, let’s call it experiment.

Experimentation is a much better word to use, though I already know it’s too wonky and beaker-y to catch on. Still, it’s worth talking about the difference if only to make the word we’ll be stuck with for the next year — FAILURE! — meaningful. Here’s the difference:

Let’s use a fresh example from an unexpected place: the iPhone. This is from the WIRED cover story:

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting

Jobs rather famously doesn’t celebrate failure. What he’s done in this moment is call something what it is — inadequate, not acceptable, deeply troubling. At the same time, however, he didn’t throw a tantrum. There was a critique in his assessment of the prototype/iteration/rev/version/experiment/failure — and it went beyond the bugs. Bugs can be solved and closed, the bigger issue was that it wasn’t coming together as a coherent product. That was a design moment, an experiment being evaluated — there was no celebration of failure.

As Nick Cage so memorably re-told the story in the immortal national treasure National Treasure: “When Thomas Edison was asked how it felt to fail 99 times trying to invent the light bulb, Edison said ‘I didn’t fail 99 times. I discovered 99 ways how NOT to make a light bulb.’”

Stop failing and patting yourself on the back for it. Start experimenting and stay focused on quality and success.

I’m convinced that there is a condition, that should be in upcoming DSM , of environmentally induced cognitive diminishment. I’m calling it “the Googles” and I believe I suffer from said Googles. I’ve been thinking about this condition since reading Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making us Stupid” (my blog bit about it here). Carr has witnessed several diminishments: Shortened attention spans, decreased ability to focus on complex ideas, and the near impossibility of thinking deeply about something. He attributes it to Google because their commercial model, which is central to so much of our knowledge seeking, encourages short-attention span and quantity of items viewed over quality of the viewing.

On first reading the article, I immediately saw myself and my friends in those symptoms — trouble reading novels, never reading an article to completion, rarely stopping to re-read a passage, and a rushed, frenetic sense that I need to quickly skim the next thing lest I miss something. Carr has an upcoming book that describes the situation as being chronically stuck in “the shallows”. But I think it actually goes deeper. I think the symptoms above have related symptoms and speak to a deeper condition:

- inability to formulate original thoughts within various pockets of my industry of internet marketing (and its sub-disciplines of design, UX, and strategy), it feels like our conversations are increasingly about analogies and metaphors and case studies. “Let’s do it like Apple”, “this is how Google rolls”, “we need to do for x category what this company did in y”, “let’s adopt this model”. These threads lack originality on two levels. First, it’s all by reference to something else. There’s no blank slate, there are no truly fresh looks (you may bring in fresh eyes, but that voice is usually just reacting and spouting first thoughts, not helping to go deeper than where you started). Second, it multiplies the shallowing effect Carr talks about. What does anyone mean when they reference Apple or Google? Do we really have a deep, shared understanding of what we’re agreeing to? Do we understand what it means in terms of day-to-day work?

- inability to have deep conversations or true information exchanges having the Googles means that my talking style has started to resemble the research/information gathering style above The person suffering from ‘the Googles’ has conversations full of quick hits across a wide range of topics and entries. Like a stone skipping across a lake, they never go deep. Googles-infected conversations tend to be the exchange of memes or the matching of related links. A colleague utters a word or phrase embedded in a sentence with deeper thought. But I latch onto that word and immediately my brain bubbles up search results of related links. Then, without connecting the dots or evaluating the context, I blurt out my top-ranked meme. My counterpart is just as likely to latch onto my keywords and do the same. We leave these conversations with a half-shared understanding of what we’re doing and lack the energy or will to push deep. Dialog is replaced by a semi-grounded free association of memes, references, and synaptic firings sparked by keywords in the sentences spoken.

So these are my symptoms, deficits, diminishments:

- shortened attention span
- reduced focus
- inability to follow complex texts
- difficulty staying in a deep conversation
- diving below the memes and hyperlinking in my brain into original thoughts

I call the cluster of symptoms ‘the Googles’ and I am starting treatment (next post . . . )

Just finished reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, a collection of essays about being a father, son, husband, former child, and writer. I read the book almost immediately and instantly, underlining lots of passages and phrases (wasn’t available in Kindle). Interestingly, it looks like guys on goodreads.com dug it less than women (might be more accurate to say several man trashed it while women gave it consistently high marks).

Beyond the observations about specifically male things, Chabon spends a great deal of time writing about how we flex our imaginations, and how we play and create as children and adults. He hits a lot of the same themes, through very different angles, as Gever Tully of the Tinkering School does in his various talks. While Tully talks about how we overprotect children and have lost the early male ritual of receiving a pocket knife, Chabon talks about the pointlessness of teaching his daughter how to ride a bike. When he rode a bike, he would disappear from his house for the entire day, exploring the neighborhood, visiting friends and just riding. Today, he feels like that has been supplanted through a fear of abductions and that kids have much less uncharted play time.

That theme of uncharted comes up throughout these essays, especially in “The Splendor of Crap”, an essay where he talks about the importance of junk culture in imagination, childhood and even adult play. I just love this passage about the old TV show The Planet of the Apes:

“There’s no doubt that the Planet of the Apes TV show was crap. Yes, the makeup was decent for its time, and the shows tried, in the dutiful manner of early seventies post-Star Trek, pre-Star Wars, TV SF to address weighty issues … But it remained a knockoff of a knockoff, the sequels to sequels, worked up by veteran TV hacks to fill up the spaces between Parkay margarine ads. What’s more, it was crap that flopped, canceled after only three months.

But it had, crucially to my theory of what makes great mass art, the powerful quality of being open-ended, vague at its borders. In its very incompleteness, born of lack of budget, the loose picaresque structure, even its cancellation . . . it hinted at things beyond its own borders. There was room for you and your imagination in the narrative map of the show.”

Along these lines, he is actually rather critical of Pixar films (the first voice I’ve come across doesn’t worship every aspect of Pixar and its work). Chabon describes today’s animated movies:

The new studio-made CGI products are like unctuous butlers of the imagination, ready to serve every need or desire as it arises; they don’t leave anything implied, unstated, incomplete. There is no room in them for children. And so they never form the basis for my own kids’ games.

In a different essay, he makes a point that actually snapped my head out of the book. His biggest gripe about Pixar is the way they make Sid the villain in Toy Story. When Sid puts dresses on the cowboys and mixes parts and breaks the toys to see how they work, Chabon asks, isn’t he doing exactly what kids are supposed to do with toys? I had unquestioningly bought into the movie’s narrative, but after that comment, the good kid reminds me of a nerdy toy collector, keeping things MIB (mint in box), and suddenly I realize that leaving aside the ham-fisted presentation of Sid’s sadism, I actually relate much more to the dirt and grime and dark of Sid’s place than our hero kid’s room.

Not new, necessarily, to fans of Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture or Steven Johnson’s Emergence, but a nice twist.

We have the classic line from Picasso about artists being people who manage to hold on to their childhood curiosity, energy, and willingness to experiment. We sometimes connect them to toys and play (MAKE Magazine has the “Permission to Play” t-shirt). This ignite talk takes us into the ________ world of adult Lego fans or __________.

I’m leaving those words blank, cuz I’m not sure this talk demonstrates the value of re-connecting with toys. The speaker doesn’t talk about sparking lateral thinking, improving brain age, the wonders of a refreshed and open mind, or the chance to create. He just really digs it, and he’s amused about the mania that comes with playing with Legos.

Still, he has a great line at the beginning, “the dark ages are the time between you stop playing with Legos as a child and decide as an adult that it’s OK to play with a kid’s toy again.” (One other great moment is when he’s having dinner with a woman from Lego and he describes all “these marketing people who keep asking (in a whiny voice)’aren’t you afraid it will hurt your brand? how do you control your brand?”

A more interesting, or more immediately useful, look at Legos come from the editor of Nuts & Volts and a class he teaches at Harvard Medical School.

Just re-read Martin Neuimeier’s A Designful Company along with a bunch of my co-workers. Reading a book at the same time as other people is a fantastic thing to do — it sets of neuronic chain reactions and builds common language — and the book itself was pretty good. However, it highlights one of the things that continues to bother me about our collective obsession with innovation.

Neumeier has a passage where he describes his “good/different” chart. It’s not rendered as a quad graph in the Kindle version of the book, but given that it involves two variables with 2 possible values, it practically screams for one:

Like any good quad graph, “up and to the right” is the sweet spot, or, as Neumeier put it “as you might have guessed, ‘good and different’ is the combination that produces home runs.” This bugs me. While I know marketing is all about the whitespace, the onlyness, the thing that no one else does, it seems like a distraction from the real issue: quality and betterness. Good and different could translate into Netflix and the Prius (examples Neumeier cites). But it could also translate into another rev of Microsoft Word that has yet another feature which not only doesn’t make it better, it actually makes it marginally worse because of the clutter and confusion. This would still be “good but different” (making it worse didn’t make it bad).

“Good but different”, as a construct misprioritizes and muddies people’s thinking. Good can very easily become good enough (the Microsoft example) and can cause people to rush to novelty or newness as the goal. Rather than focusing on being better/best, we pick the most obvious and lowest possible standard (who would actually argue on behalf of not good?).

Netflix is much better understood not as different (they used the mail), but as better than the current space. Yes, they used mail, but they did so in order to address the flaws of the video store model: availability of films, locational convenience, and perhaps most important, late fees. Prius is still actually a car, but it’s a better car, not a different one: it burns fuels more efficiently, it runs quieter. The point wasn’t to be as good as the past, with a difference, the goal was to solve problems with fossial fuels and internal combustion engines.

We should really throw out the notion of being different and focus on being good, better, then best. Not only does it avoid the rush to novelty, but it forces product creators (marketers, designers, engineers) to get customer- and user-centric in their thinking. It forces us to step back and ask first questions: what is good/ what would be better? is our belief that the status quo is good really accurate? is our understanding of the category (video distribution) correct?

Scott Berkun has a great post about why we should stop saying innovation, with the great line, which to me says it all: “Just be good. That’s hard enough. Most things made in the world suck. They really do.” This is a big cultural change for most places because an understanding of quality, of what is actually good is usually missing (or not shared or driven by individual tastes) and a conversation to understand what’s good requires time. Much easier to assume that what’s in front of you is plenty good and look for something that makes it stand out. But that’s the real lesson of the above examples, a focus on doing something better, on solving the pain points.

Stop talking about innovation, stop looking for points of differentiation, build a better ________ and people will beat the proverbial cliche to your hackneyed portal and you’ll be all win-win in the sweet spot of whatever quad graph you have.

The first 1:30 of the documentary Moog has a great line from Robert Moog, the inventor of the synthesizer and one of the parents of electronic music: “I can feel what’s going on inside of a piece of electronic equipment.” There are other passages in the movie (which has great tributes from electronic music performers such as Sun Ra, DJ Spooky, Mix Master Mike, Electric Skychurch and a wonderful animated title sequence), where he shows how visualizes the interactions of circuits and components. Interestingly, he also points out that his synthesizers are analog instruments, not digital ones and that he knows musicians approach the physicality of the electrical vibrations in the same way they approach violin, guitar, and piano strings.

Anyway, that close connection to material — which strikes me as a result of closely working and experimenting with them — as a source of inspiration, quality, and innovation is a theme near and dear to me. So, I clipped the movie and encourage would-be innovators and inventors to check it out. Moog the man is charming, engaged, lives a full life, and could be a more earth-bound person to learn from than Steve Jobs, Edison, and other lofty luminaries.

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PS One last reason to watch the movie is a Schaeffer beer commercial in which a 70s-mustachioed dude in polyester, riffs on the Moog for 20 seconds before the jingle (”Schaeffer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one.”) Worth the price of admission all by itself.

KLPP is now on YouTube in ten short segments. A big thanks to Farrah Hassen for filming under challenging conditions (i.e., no space for a tripod, stifling heat). It’s got a nice cinema verite feel!
Capital Fringe Festival 2009 production of John Feffer’s almost-one-man play, Krapp’s Last Power Point. Written, directed, and performed by John Feffer. Audience member: Karin Lee. (I did the powerpoint that accompanies the play and vexes the one-man.)

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Part Five:

Part Six:

Part Seven:

Part Eight:

Part Nine:

Part Ten:

There are lots of articles, tools, books, exercises out there about how to generate ideas and all of them deal in one way or another with brainstorms. Over the years, we’ve all read about the various faultlines: how many people, how is it structured, what kind of people, rules of engagement, handling evaluation of ideas, facilitation, how much and what kind of prep prior, follow-through after, fresh eyes vs already immersed.

Inevitably, over the course of long dialogs about how, whether, and why brainstorm, someone points out that the final ideas almost never come out of brainstorms, leading to a conclusion of ‘why bother’, ‘rethink it (once again) from scratch’, or ‘keep doing them, but don’t put too much energy into them.’

I’ve always valued brainstorms for things other than (or in addition to) the actual ideas they bring. After a brainstorm, people, especially those who are leading the project or will stay with it for a while, leave with certain things:

Fans of Carl Sagan or viewers of the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation are familiar with the phrase “primordial soup.” It’s a rich collection of proteins, amino acids, and highly active and interactive materials out of which the material of life can emerge. It is not life, it is not the beginning of evolution. Rather, it’s the source material from which organic matter/lifestuff will emerge. All it needs is an infusion of energy, some random mutations, conditions which are hostile enough to challenge but supportive enough to engage and then life begins, mutates, and evolves.

Brainstorms should be viewed, and maybe conducted, in this way — they generate the basic molecules and proteins of the creative process but are not the creative output itself.

Tim OReilly (@timoreilly) tweeted that an attendee of his talk did visual notes of his presentation.

The notes were “taken”/drawn by @jonnygoldstein. More here.

Reading and thoroughly digging Steven Johnson’s Invention of Air and seeing an overlap with discussions about planning and innovation (clunky intro, but accurate).

Early in Johnson’s book, he tells the story of how we discovered the Gulf Stream. It was a convergence of vaguely, not immediately apparently, connected things. In the 1760s there were several things being observed by people engaged in undirected, scientific observation. Joseph Priestley was using the new Fahrenheit thermometer to measure ocean water temperatures at different depths and locations. He had no idea if it would add up to something, but was simply curious and observant. Benjamin Franklin had notices that there were “gulph weeds” present along certain lines of sight in the ocean, lines which had little connection to landmass or shorelines. Sailors were informally logging certain places where sailing was smoother and faster. There was also a fascination with and fear of waterspouts.

All of these things were unconnected or loosely connected, until a question about the postal system emerged: why does it take longer for letters to travel from Europe to America than it does for letters to travel in the opposite direction?

Johnson’s characterization of this intellectual convergence, says something about innovation and discovery:

[British authorities curious about this question] were lucky in another respect: the postmaster in question happened to be Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin would ultimately turn that postal mystery into one of the great scientific breakthroughs of his career: a turning point in our visualization of the macro patterns formed by ocean currents. Franklin was well-prepared for the task. As a twenty-year old, traveling back from his first voyage to London in 1726, he had recorded notes in his journal about the strange prevalence of “gulph weed” in the waters of the North Atlantic. In a letter written twenty years later, he had remarked on the slower passage westward across the Atlantic, though at the time he supposed it was attributable to the rotation of the earth.

There’s additional layers to this very compelling story (I just love Johnson’s books), but the key things of interest to me are the components of discovery and invention:

A theme that cuts across all of these is looseness of process connected to open-ness to the new. This is an occasional theme in innovation literature which talks about generosity of spirit, lateral inspiration and thinking, and the ability to quickly move in and out of modes of discourse, multiple configurations of ideas and data points.

(Image taken from http://www.benjaminfranklinhouse.org/)