Should we allow new ideas to fail? At a recent business roundtable, the topic was how to set product innovation up for success. I spend the bulk of my days helping organizations stretch to tackle business challenges by shepherding teams through a process of experimentation and learning so they have confidence in the ideas they choose to implement and scale. Since then, I’ve been scrutinizing not only what failure looks like, but also how it feels.
There’s a saying that’s usually applied to writing: “Kill your darlings.” It’s a nudge to let go of a much-chewed-over clever phrase that doesn’t help the overall story.
We use the saying at IDEO, too. But our “darlings” are hypotheses or “sacrificial concepts” that we…