The late US comedy actor Don Adams used to tell a story on the chat show circuit about how, as a young, aspiring standup comedian, he learnt to become an expert in deadpan delivery. Adams, famed for his portrayal of the anti-spy, Maxwell Smart, in the hit Mel Brookes TV series, Get Smart, was, in the early years of his career, asked to be the warm-up act for the legendary American stage and film actress, Mae West.
Summoned to Ms. West’s dressing room to provide an impromptu performance of his comedy routine, Adams was bemused by the feedback he received from the great lady of the early years of Hollywood. He was “too funny”. He needed to deliver his lines in a monotone and not play his shtick for laughs. The bottom line was that Ms. West did not want to be upstaged. The money for an entire season of work in a Leading Los Angeles club proved too alluring for Adams and with as much courage as he could muster, he went on stage and discovered to his amazement that he was slaying his audiences in the aisles. They found his poker-faced delivery hilarious. Deadpan comedy eventually became the actor’s unique selling feature and he went on to become to play the lead role in a long-running hit TV series.
Although forced into a discovery of what made him truly funny, Adams’ anecdote offers a keen insight into how experimentation and a willingness to fail can lead to tremendous success.
In the Twenty-First Century, there is a panoply of names, technology-based business terms and acronyms that a comedian of Adams’ stature might have had a lot of fun with. Cloud-based e-commerce, AI, IoT, ecosystems, pivot, synergy, agile working, Zoom calls, and disruption. Perhaps questionably, it is fortunate that we choose not to find these terms amusing because they have helped to lift businesses and even whole economies into a new dynamic where nothing stays the same for long.
In short, everything has shifted, all the furniture has been rearranged in the business world – and it continues to shift and be reordered. Being able to adapt quickly could make the difference between staying afloat and foundering. Most fundamentally, business leaders and managers should reevaluate and think afresh about risk, uncertainty and failure.
Many organisations have highly structured ‘stage-gate’ processes for managing innovation, as a way of keeping things as orderly and predictable as possible. However, the reality is that innovation is messy and requires an acceptance of high failure rates. And never more so than in these unprecedented times. Numerous businesses will struggle to embrace this new reality. They might know in theory that failure is meant to be valued, but they have not quite put this into practice. Old habits die hard: bosses used to hold postmortems when projects or products fail are now going to need to focus on genuine learning.
There have been companies that adopt a zero-tolerance approach to failure. The person who failed gets fired, the failure gets swept under the carpet and everyone gets the message that this must not happen again. This creates a fear culture – people follow the rules, whether they make sense or not, and no one dares try anything new. This is not a recipe for success in this world where the context is changing daily.
The courageous innovator
Fortunately, there are some lessons we can all learn from businesses that have taken learning from failure seriously. Tim Harford, the author of Adapt, said there were three essential steps: try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; make failure survivable, because it will be common; and make sure that you know when you’ve failed.
Another framework to apply to such a process would be to ‘fail methodically’. Through a process of robust experimentation, learn to maximise one’s return on failure. This sounds like an excellent plan, so why don’t more people do it?
It’s not hard to discover the fault line because when one actually takes a business person with responsibilities and a budget and sit them down and say, why don’t you do this as an experiment?, they will invariably say, ‘No, that won’t work: let’s pilot it or do some more research’.
Experimentation is beautiful in concept but it is very difficult for people to have the guts to follow through. An experiment says, ‘let’s run two different pilots’. You have to admit that you don’t know the right way forward – and nobody likes to admit that.
UAE, UK, US – the world! A useful four-step process to business success
Experimentation is arguably an even harder concept to take to reality in these challenging times of pandemic and economic disruption. With this thought in mind, it is pleasing to learn that more than 10,000 SMEs have benefited from the UAE’s coronavirus support scheme. There is more to the success of the region than this, and it is underpinned by the long-standing and far-sighted government and VC support for new businesses that favour bourgeoning e-commerce enterprises.
Such is the success of this growing enterprise culture that it has been recently reported that the UAE is now set to overtake the UK for e-commerce adoption as more and more businesses go online.
Wherever one is practising business in the world – whether it is within the UAE, the US or the UK the following four-step risk-mitigation framework may prove useful to keep in mind when you’re designing experiments:
1. Make your hypotheses explicit. A good experiment is designed so that whatever the outcome, you’ve learned something new. It’s much better to be able to say your hypothesis wasn’t supported than to say the project failed.
2. Limit the scope of the experiment. In the world of IT, the ‘sandbox’ is the offline testing environment where you try out new code. The same concept applies in business more generally – try the experiment in a limited way and make sure to run the new in parallel with the old.
3. Start at home. You want to stay under the radar during the early days of your experiment, while you figure out if it’s really a good idea. So this means trying it out in your own department or business first, and using volunteers to help you. You don’t want to expose yourself to formal review until you’re well down the track.
4. Iterate. You never get everything right the first time. So learn the power of iteration and continuous improvement. James Dyson famously tried more than 5,000 prototypes before his bagless vacuum cleaner worked. Hopefully, you won’t need quite that many.
