Fighting the Stigma of Failure with Agile Development

Tags: Industry

This article originally appeared in the July issue of Survey Magazine. Read it here.

agile developmentAs I grow older, I grapple with the thought of failing.  It makes me think twice about stepping outside my comfort zone. Quite frankly, it’s a lot easier to stick to areas of past accomplishments and skills.  This is far more comforting than looking like a damn fool trying something new.  Still, I realize that growth means stretching my comfort zone, and being willing to fail is part of the energy that fuels personal development.

I see the same conflict in my day job.  The traditional role of the research department is to help the organization make better decisions.  Mining the opinions of customers, market research is able to provide objective insight into go/no go decisions, thus helping the organization utilize funds more wisely.

As an extension of this core mission, I’ve always felt that the role of MR is to mitigate risk, thus avoiding costly failures. But what if we turn that notion on its head and say that the role of market research is to fail early and fail often.  How counterintuitive is that?

Let’s look at another potential application of customer insights; let’s say instead of asking customers to react to concepts, we ask them to help develop them from scratch via iterative agile development.  In sharp contrast to MR, the goal of agile development is to fail early and fail often via a collaborative, iterative process.

Can we as researchers break out of our comfort zone to embrace failure and capture the wisdom of crowds via the agile development process?

Considering the Thomas Edison quote, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work,” there is no getting around the need for perspiration to achieve success. Taking snapshots of consumer reaction to a concept board via surveys seems like a 19th century approach to a 21st century need.  Not only do we need that reaction, but we need to move systematically, inexorably forward toward refining that concept.  Hence the need for ongoing, agile iteration.

That said, agile iteration can be seen as a bicycle.  What gear are you in?  If you remain committed to the same ideation process that historically produces a scant 10% success rate, I would say you are stuck in 1st gear.  You can peddle all you want, you’re not going anywhere quickly and you’re just wasting a lot of energy.

Perhaps in the near future, a physicist will write a formula for optimal ideation allocation among all affected cohorts.  But for now we will have to follow Thomas Edison’s advice and start eliminating the hundreds of possibilities that don’t work.  This may seem discouraging to those in seek of a quick eureka moment, but I can say with near certainty that there is no eureka without the requisite perspiration.

So how do we best move forward on the optimal implementation of agile iteration fueled by customer co-creation?  I feel that two key challenges lay ahead:

1. Seamlessly integrating the “checks and balances” of different contributing teams, so that each voice is heard, yet no team dominates.

Turning ideas into reality requires all hands on deck.  It’s critical that every affected member of the organization feel that they have skin in the game. It’s not enough to capture customer creativity without a process that allows this infusion of new thinking to develop alongside the traditional ideation incumbents.  Let me put it more candidly: If your customers come up with a new product idea that flies in the face of what your team was developing, how much support do you think the customer-led concept will garner?  We need to better anticipate the entrenched politics and work to overcome them through inclusion. In addition, we need to ensure that all stakeholders embrace the role of failure in the creative process.  Internal teams must be accepting of consumer led concepts, but they must also be willing to acknowledge their own failures, and understand that these failures only help to pave the way for future successes.

2. Tapping customer creativity more effectively through addictive gaming.  The terms “adrenalin rush” and “market research participation” are not exactly synonymous.  Most co-creation efforts are still fairly vanilla (e.g., ranking exercises, commenting, etc.), sorely lacking the heightened pressure and drama associated with gaming.

Rather than assemble one team for agile iteration, what if it were matched competing teams?  Each would have access to the same skill set and resources.  And both would be keenly aware of their progress versus the competing team.  Teams could build off creative iterations to develop robust, winning ideas, and have a great time in the process.  In this scenario, ad agency creatives wouldn’t look at customers as their ideation enemy but rather their secret ingredient to annihilate the guy in the office next door.

In summary, a brave new world awaits us caretakers of customer opinions.  Rather than use the voice of the customer via reactive surveys or focus groups, we need to unleash this creativity by providing them access to our business challenges.  And most importantly, we need to remember that failure is an important part of the iterative agile development process.

The combination of iterative agile development fueled by the untapped creativity of core customers can provide the organization with powerful, sustainable ideation.   Who knows what may develop.

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