I failed today, and I'm weirdly happy about it

I failed today, and I'm weirdly happy about it.

That's not because I enjoy wasting time or effort. It's because today's failure was really just another iteration on the road to a better solution.

Most people think failure is... failure. We've been conditioned to treat it as a dead end. But what if it's the on-ramp to something better?

Two crashes and a fifteen-year rover

In 1999, NASA lost two Mars spacecraft within a few months of each other.

The first, the Mars Climate Orbiter, was destroyed because one team's software reported in English units and another's expected metric. A $125 million spacecraft, undone by a units conversion. The second, the Mars Polar Lander, went silent on its way to the surface.

NASA could have retreated. Instead, it investigated both losses in detail, published what went wrong, and changed how it built and checked the next mission.

The next mission was a pair of rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. They were designed to last 90 days. Opportunity kept going for nearly fifteen years.

The Mars rovers didn't get to Mars on version one.

Iteration beats perfection

Chasing perfection makes you slow. Being willing to fail fast and adjust quickly gets you closer to a solution that works.

That's not just tech-world talk. It applies to policy, procurement, software, forms, and even community engagement. Every misstep, every "oops," is a data point. And data points make the next version smarter.

Failure tells you what people need

Finding out what doesn't work is as important as finding out what does.

Nobody built a digital permit system that worked on the first try. The early hiccups taught those teams what real people needed, which is rarely what looked good in the flowchart.

How to fail well

• Fail small. Test with ten users before ten thousand. NASA's lesson cost $125 million. Yours can cost an afternoon.
• Fail early. The cheapest time to be wrong is before launch.
• Write it down. A failure you don't record is one you'll repeat.
• Don't punish the messenger. If people get blamed for surfacing problems, they'll stop surfacing them.

The bottom line

Failing faster gets us to usable, better, human-centered outcomes faster.

Next time you hit a wall, don't back away. Take a breath, take a note, and take the next step.

A shorter version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn. Join the discussion there.