A few years ago I went to art college. OK, I didn’t really go to art college. Not in the cool jeans-covered-in-paint, Gauloises-smoking sense. I took a few courses in design at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. I took the courses for pleasure but, surprisingly, I learned a few things that have had direct application in my work. In this post I share the first of my top three learnings.

Fail Forward Faster

Fail Forward Faster is a simple concept: it is better to rapidly design and build a solution for a given problem that to spend a long time perfecting your design before beginning to build. This is because your initial design will inevitably be flawed in ways that cannot be known when designing but that can be discovered quickly by building.

This lesson was demonstrated to us through an exercise. We had to build a structure capable of holding an egg one metre above the floor using dry spaghetti, string and masking tape. My group designed an elegant A-frame solution braced with a single guy wire. It was beautiful on paper. When constructed, the spaghetti bowed dramatically and our egg was not held high enough off the floor. We failed.

Another group built a chaotic, bendy Eiffel Tower. They began building quickly and added to their design on the fly to reinforce sections that bent too far. They succeeded.

Application to Business

We have similar approaches in IT of course. Prototypes. Proofs of concept. Iterative methodologies. Agile. But never have the benefits of an iterative approach been demonstrated to me so clearly. Want to convince your colleagues that iterative methods work? Grab some spaghetti, string and tape.