Further to Sir Ken Robinson’s fabulous TED Talk on education, and further to my presentation on Un-managing and the research I included in it by Malone & Lepper regarding intrinsic motivation, creating risk-positive-failure-forward environments are crucial to innovation.
I had a discussion regarding this a while back with Joshua Schachter (I think it was at ETech, right after I read the chapter on the birth of Del.icio.us from Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. We were musing on how crucial it is to have the room to fail in order to actually ‘discover’ anything new and that it appeared from the founder stories that many of them discovered a success by actually failing multiple times (or as a result of a failure itself).
Think of all of the ‘innovators’ in history - the number of ‘failed’ experiments!
Living in the valley is like living in a different universe. When I travel around the world, I see smatterings of what I am surrounded by here: pro-risk personalities. And the less ‘grounded’ people are in their need for certainty, the crazier their ideas seem to be. (now, I’m not saying that crazy = good, just that safe = same old same old) Over and over again, when people ask how they can achieve the silicon valley type of opportunities in their areas, I tell them, “Celebrate failure.” Failure is cheaper than ever. Fail often. I often get puzzled looks and a backlash.
Now, I’m not saying that people should aim to fail, but by embracing that possibility, we open ourselves to taking more risks and, thus, succeeding. And the types of risks we take…those matter, too. I still don’t believe that we should take needless, stupid risks like mortgaging your house to buy a billboard ad (but that’s my call, not yours). We should take risks on ideas and people and following dreams…just to see where they should go.
So, in the discussion with Josh, we laughed about the idea of doing a LoserCamp…a BarCamp designed to celebrate how we’ve failed along the way. Why we’ve ‘failed’. What we’ve learnt. And how to allow ourselves to fail more often until we get to the point of a ‘win’ (and we need to redefine what this means there, too). We need to take a look at the ‘failures’ and celebrate them as risk takers. As people who have the balls to try something that is unconventional. Were they too early to market? Too late? Spent too much too fast? Didn’t spend enough?
What we need to get out of this is NOT a formula for avoiding failure, but a bunch of anecdotes on how we can minimize the impacts of failure in order to fail over and over and over again. AND how we can create opportunities for others to fail as well. Especially in places other than silicon valley, where we inherently laugh in the face of failure (and flaunt it proudly in many cases). We may want safety nets - but not too secure (or they become crutches). We definitely want a more positive take on people who have risked and failed with plenty of encouragement to get up, brush yourself off and go for it again.
So…LoserCamp….when? Where? Anyone want to step forward? I’ll totally work alongside you, but I’d rather see a Barcamp newbie take this on. And I want to see it happen in a place outside of the valley. NE1?
—————
Update: I should add why I think it is very important to call this LoserCamp and keep it in the failure space:
#1. We all stumble and fall, but we often think we are alone in doing so. De-stigmatizing ‘failure’ or the negative outcomes makes it much easier for people to talk about it and connect on that level. Remember my post, ‘Forgiving Your Inner Gollum’? I received over 15 personal emails thanking me for being so honest and letting others know they weren’t alone.
#2. We aren’t just celebrating learning from failure, we are celebrating the act of not being afraid of it. It’s a bit defiant to reclaim the negative word. I like that.
It’s very much about embracing the chaos. I don’t want to paint a pretty picture of it. It’s tough. It sucks. And there are costs. But the rewards are high, too. 
View Tara Hunt's profile
10 Comments
Wow. Great last two posts. The best I’ve read by far this day. And the losercamp sounds great. I would travell to asist
Congrats!
Honest, this isn’t a backlash…more of a sidelash, I guess. And, like most blog comments, this is all IMHO…
I think the phrase “celebrate failure” suffers from a packaging problem. Based on the rest of your post, that’s not even what you really appear to mean. You want people to celebrate learning, whether from success or failure, and that the only activity worthy of scorn is failing and not learning from it.
I picked up the phrase “fail forward” for this, though I’m not sure from where, and since there’s only ~15,700 Google hits on the phrase, it’s obviously not used much…
I love the idea of loser camp - we’re told so often to win at all costs, never give up, etc but we can learn so much from failures.
Actually Seth Godin has a book out called The Dip, I haven’t read it but I think the general premise is sometimes it’s best to give up and fail so you can move on to bigger things rather than flogging a dead horse.
You did it again Tara hit the nail on the head or at least stuck a pin in my rear end. I’ve failed(? what do we mean ?) so many times in so many different things. I’d like,love to learn about other peoples failures and how they dealt with them. Go of and cry ina corner then come raging back keep on flogging a dead horse until it smells too bad sit down and dream up another crazy (according to your friends idea) Yeah lets have a loosers camp wanta better name how about “Dust off Camp” from the idea of falling of a horse or bike as a kid and being told get up dust of the seat of your pants and get on again.
If the location makes it practical I will be there. I’ve got a million ideas for failing again.
Best
Roger
Yeah, I’ve wanted to organize something on failures and lessons learned. Too many conferences are about what’s currently hot, but I feel that it’s failure that teaches, not success. I’d rather learn from other people’s mistakes instead of guess at what might have made them successful.
I promise to get LoserCamp started in Manchester. This seems like a great idea that a lot of people around here can learn from.
Your LoserCamp idea reminds me of a meeting I attended, in the early 1980’s, of Wal-Mart store managers and executives. A store manager stood up and told the story of a promotion he tried that was a disaster. My first thought was that he had lost his mind, admitting failure in front of the top brass. Then another manager stood up and said “If you thought that was bad, listen to how we screwed up.” Much of the afternoon was taken up by graphic descriptions of mistakes and failures. When I asked one of the store managers about this at the break, he said “this way we don’t all repeat the same mistakes.” That’s when I knew this was a company that would continue to be successful.
I can definatly see how it would fit in Manchester- but in the same token I see how precise people are in their actions and how afraid they are to take the unsafe route (yes… I’m talking about you -Ian as well as myself)
Maybe this would help us to jump in with out holding back…
Interesting idea, but if you assert that The Valley embraces failure so much better than the rest of the world, than maybe the first of these camps should be in the Valley?
I think it’s a lot to ask to someone to try get a bunch of people in Paris or New York to willingly attend an event and celebrate failure.
Maybe if you do it successfully in Silicon Valley the idea will spread?
Great idea. Far too often companies try to hide their mistakes in striving to appear perfect, even going so far as to believe these mistakes never happened internally (i.e. strike this event from our records and thoughts). Well chalk this up as another bad mistake. There is so much opportunity to learn and grow from our mistakes and more importantly share these experiences with others so everyone can evolve and grow.
I’ve done a lot of online web work related to the video game industry (computer games) and I’ve seen this happen quite a bit in that industry. Thus you have game developers creating a new game, yet they often repeat the same mistakes others have made. It is changing though. Gamasutra has been posting postmortems by game developers for quite a while now, so others can learn from those willing to share their mistakes.
2 Trackbacks
[...] failures. In this context, Tara Hunt who has magical cures for (Marketing) virus is proposing a LoserCamp in the anecdotal BarCamp structure. I like the way it is named( no attempt to dress up, show of sincerity/humility), and Tara has more [...]
Celebrating Failure…
A week or so ago, Tara Hunt posted a thought-provoking blog entry. That isn’t really a shock since most of……