Fail Fast, Learn Quick: The Hard, Honest Case for Embracing Mistakes in Business

You don't get better by pretending you are already finished.

That's blunt, but it's true, and it's exactly why the "fail fast, learn quick" idea is not some Silicon Valley fad; it's a practical discipline that business leaders in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth need to adopt now if they want to stay relevant. I've sat in enough boardrooms and war rooms to know that Organisations either institutionalise learning or they fossilise. There's no polite middle ground.

Why I'm in favour of failing fast (and yes, I know that will annoy some planners)

• Planning has its place. But over planning is an expensive kind of cowardice.
• Rapid experimentation surfaces reality, not assumptions. Reality trounces plans.

Both statements will rile the cautious, but they're rooted in hard experience.

The cultural blockade: why failure is still a dirty word

In many Australian workplaces, and in most cultures, frankly, failure is framed as shameful. From schools that reward perfect scores to HR processes that subtly penalise risk takers, we've built systems that favour cover ups and incrementalism over courageous experimentation. That's a taxonomy of mediocrity.

Perfectionism is seductive. It makes people feel safe. It delays decisions. It is often masqueraded as "quality control" when it's really procrastination dressed up with spreadsheets and meetings. I'd argue, controversially to some, that perfectionism costs more than a few failed projects ever will. You lose market time, employee energy and often your best ideas.

But culture can shift. It begins with language. Stop using "failure" as an insult in front of teams. Start using "learning event" or "evidence collection" in your daily stand ups. Small change. Big difference.

The philosophy, and the mechanics, of failing fast

Fail fast isn't about encouraging sloppy work. It's a method for accelerating learning while limiting cost and exposure. The mechanics are simple:

• Hypothesise
• Build the smallest test that proves or disproves that hypothesis
• Measure what matters
• Iterate, pivot, persevere or close down

Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) are the classic tool here. An MVP is not a half baked product; it's the fastest, cheapest way to validate a critical assumption. If you're spending nine months building the perfect version before you ever pitch it, you are doing it backward.

Data matters. Measure early, measure often, and measure the right things. Metrics should tell you whether your assumptions are holding up, not just whether a feature works. Customer behaviour beats opinions every time.

A reality check: reskilling matters, and the clock is ticking

This isn't just management theory. The World Economic Forum predicted in its Future of Jobs Report that by 2025 roughly 50% of all employees will need reskilling. Call it a wake up call. If your Organisation is still reliant on static job descriptions and annual performance reviews, you are on a path to ever increasing mismatch between capability and need.

Make no mistake, reskilling is part of failing fast. The more experiments you run, the more your people need the ability to learn new skills quickly. That should be a strategic priority, not an HR checkbox.

Post mortems that actually work

I've facilitated my fair share of post mortems. Done poorly, they become blame rituals. Done well, they become the single most valuable leadership activity in an Organisation.

Good post mortems have these traits:

• No surprises: anyone who needs to be there is there
• Psychological safety: people can speak without fear
• Root cause rigour: ask "why" until the system level causes appear
• Action orientation: each insight leads to a clear, accountable change

One tiny practical tip, write down three things that went well as rigorously as you document what went wrong. Successes carry learning too. Too many teams only celebrate and never dissect what actually delivered the value.

Knowledge management: capturing lessons so they don't leave with people

If lessons aren't documented, they're wasted. That doesn't mean long reports that gather dust. It means searchable, short, actionable entries, bite sized reflections attached to projects, not buried in email chains. Tag them. Link them. Make them findable.

But documentation alone isn't enough. You need mechanisms to reuse knowledge: playbooks, onboarding sequences, sprint retros that pull from past learnings. Otherwise your Organisation keeps reinventing the wheel, and the wheel keeps popping.

Resilience as a capability

Resilience is not stoicism. It's a capability: the ability to recover, adapt and re mobilise. Failing fast builds resilience by forcing you to confront reality early, adapt strategy and retain optionality. If you only fail big and rarely, you also lose the muscle memory for adaptation.

Resilience is learnt in small doses, quick experiments, honest feedback, and the discipline to accept that not every idea is a winner.

Case studies: the useful myth of the big name comeback

People point to Apple's Newton or Google's scrapped projects as examples of waste, and they're missing the point. These Organisations treated those failures as data. They were willing to cannibalise ego for insight. That's instructive.

Meanwhile, plenty of smaller Australian companies I've worked with have pivoted from near bankruptcy to solid footing because they treated customer behaviour as the oracle. They listened, iterated, and let go when evidence showed their hypothesis was wrong. That's entrepreneurship at its best, messy, expensive, courageous.

Pivoting is not desperation. It's intelligence.

Where critics are right, and where they're not

Critics say "fail fast" leads to shallow ideas and churn. True, it can, if your governance is weak. If executives treat experiments as a dodge for strategy, you get waste. Fail fast requires discipline: clear hypotheses, measured outcomes, and a governance loop that decides which experiments deserve scale.

On the other side, I'll say something that will rile traditionalists: planning without early testing is luxury for the confident and financial. In most markets now, that luxury is gone. Be more iterative. Plan less detail. Test more. Leaders who treat this as faddish will fail. Leaders who institutionalise it will outpace rivals.

Practical steps for leaders who want to make failing fast work

1. Reframe failure publicly

Make every failed experiment part of a public learning log. Reward transparency.

2. Train managers in post mortem facilitation

Most managers default to assigning blame. Train them to ask better questions.

3. Fund a small innovation budget

Give teams a small, recurring budget for experiments with fast reporting requirements.

4. Insist on measurable hypotheses

"We'll see what customers think" is not a hypothesis. "We expect 30% of users to use X within two weeks" is.

5. Harden learning pathways

Make short skill modules (microlearning) available; require teams to demonstrate new capabilities as part of project post mortems.

6. Use customer behaviour as the arbiter

If users won't use it, it doesn't matter how elegant the solution is.

One unpopular practical opinion: large Organisations should deliberately reduce approval layers for small experiments. Yes, remove some controls. No, that doesn't mean anarchy. Use thresholds, small bets flow fast, big bets still get scrutiny. This will upset compliance types, but it's the only way to keep pace.

The role of L&D, and why we're optimistic

Learning and Development has been treated as a cost centre for too long. It should be a capability centre. We see Organisations that embed learning into the workflow, micro lessons linked to project boards, coaching rotations after experiments, peer review systems, outperform those that treat L&D as an annual ritual.

We run training that emphasises rapid learning cycles and practical skills. When teams practise failing safely in a workshop, they are far more likely to do it at work.

The science bit, serendipity and experiments

In labs and on factory floors, unexpected results are where breakthroughs live. Serendipity isn't luck; it's the outcome of systematic experimentation and open minded analysis. Create the conditions: hypothesis framing, rapid testing, and a culture that rewards curious questions.

Not every experiment leads to insight. Some are dead ends. But that's fine, evidence gathered cheaply is still progress.

A warning about resource drain

Yes, experiments cost. Yes, chasing every shiny idea is a risk. That's why governance matters. Set portfolio rules: allocate a small percentage of budget to experiments, cap investments, require periodic portfolio reviews. Balance optionality with focus.

Final thoughts, messy, human, and urgent

Failing fast isn't a slogan. It's a set of practices, behaviours and governance choices that together enable Organisations to learn faster than their competitors. This is not about glorifying failure. It is about being brave enough to build small, test quickly, learn honestly and change course without ego.

To the executives who still fetishise immaculate plans: try an experiment next quarter. Keep it small. Make clear metrics. And, this is hard, be prepared to publish what you learn, even if it embarrasses you a little. Transparency builds trust. It builds speed.

We don't have all the answers. We do have a lot of tried and tested methods that work with teams across Australia. We coach leaders to design better experiments, run cleaner post mortems, and set up learning systems that stick.

And one last thing. If you are worried about wasting money on failure, remember this: the bigger risk is investing huge sums in long projects that never test their core assumptions. That's the slow death.

So go on, run the experiment. Fail fast. Learn quick. Repeat.

Sources & Notes

• World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2020, projection that by 2025 roughly 50% of all employees will need reskilling. Full citation: World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2020, www.weforum.org/future-of-jobs-report-2020.