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Janet Pilcher: Happy Monday. I’m Janet Pilcher, the host of Accelerate Your Performance, a time when we come together to learn about how to hardwire excellence in education. Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode.

Today I focus on something that has caused me to have some concern about the language we use. It’s the term “fail fast, fail often.”

Now hang with me on this one. As you know, much of our work is focused on improvement. Always knowing we can get better, be a better leader to lead better organizations.

As we coach in the field, I hear some educational leaders talk about it’s important to fail fast. And when I hear that, it doesn’t feel right. It just doesn’t sit well. I know what they mean and understand what is intended to be the message. Somehow though, it feels like the wrong message.

This past week, I ran across an article by Sahil Merchant titled, “Why I Dislike the Phrase, Fail Fast, Fail Often.” I connected to it and would like to share some of his thoughts. First, here’s a quick overview of Sahil’s experiences. He’s a founding partner at Vibrance and a seasoned entrepreneur. Sahil helps organizations achieve change outcomes related to innovation, growth, and talent. Senior leaders come to him when they have really bold ambitions. He says they know what got them and their organization to where they are today, but it will not be sufficient to get them where they want to be tomorrow. And Sahil helps leaders and their executive teams transform how they enable their people to apply systems and processes built on a different talent environment and supported by a different mindset when it comes to creating new growth. That’s just a little bit about Sahil.

And so with our Nine Principles Framework focused on improvement, I feel like that’s what we try to do with educational systems. So intrigued by the title and his same discomfort with the term “fail fast, fail often,” I read the article to learn from Sahil. I pull out some points from the article to talk through and add some of my thoughts and how they apply to our work in the field with educational leaders.

Sahil starts the article by asking how many times have we heard the modern words of wisdom that tell us to embrace failure, fail fast, fail often. He responds that he cannot afford to fail. He paints a realistic picture saying that when starting a new business as the sole earner in a family of five, failure is not an option. Something he can’t celebrate.

I think this thought helps us contextualize failure. I relate to Sahil as the founder of Studer Education, the leader of our business, I can’t afford to think about failing. And with that said, I aligned to Sahil when he says there are benefits of an iterative approach to doing work.

When I think about our responsibility in education for student success, I believe we need to fully define what we mean by “fail fast, fail often.” For example, Sahil tells us that organizations are kidding themselves when they experiment, fail, learn nothing, repeat the same errors, and fail again. He says an iterative approach to work where mistakes are seen as an early warning is only effective if mistakes translate to learnings which help avoid future mistakes.

Here’s a worry I have with just using the term “fail fast, fail often” as part of our language. If we’re not careful, “fail fast, fail often” could be used as a crutch for not hitting the mark. We may be continuing to experience failure that could have negative impact in places where we can’t afford for that to occur. Student success, for example.

If we are constantly experimenting but not learning and applying practices that help us improve to achieve better results, we aren’t doing our best work. In extreme cases, we could even be causing harm.

Here’s my point. The real aim is not to fail but to iterate. To succeed, we must be open to failure, but the real purpose is to learn by analyzing, tweaking, and applying something new from what we learn and continuing to improve as we learn. I’ve seen some of our partner organization, educational leaders experiment, learn, modify actions and behaviors to achieve better results. I’ve seen that in action. That’s what we want to do and how we explain this, coach this process, and build mindset or important points to consider.

So let’s connect back to Sahil’s article to learn more. It’s this next part of the article I love the most. Sahil writes, “I know it may sound like mere semantics, but we want an environment of learn fast, learn often.”

Oh, I love this, you all, “learn fast, learn often.” We all believe that it is okay to get things wrong, but only if we learn from things that do not produce results. We study why and then we make meaningful adjustments as we’re learning. As you read my book, Hardwiring Excellence in Education, you’ll see how important this concept is throughout the book. What I like about Sahil’s words is that we shift from a negative word “fail” and shift to a proactive and energetic word “learn” and a word that is the cornerstone of what we do in education.

We shift our language and align actions from “fail fast, fail often” to “learn fast, learn often.” In education, this is what we do well, learning. We are learners and we teach others how to learn,  and we do that by recognizing what’s right, identifying areas of improvement, and then applying strategies to get better. And we continue this process to get better and better and help others do the same to get better and better.

Here’s more on how Sahil describes “learn fast, learn often.” He says it requires an organization to think about the invisible enablers that most people take for granted. He says that the focus becomes demonstrating something has changed versus something hasn’t worked.

Let me repeat that. We demonstrate something has changed versus something has not worked.

Documenting change is more powerful than documenting what hasn’t worked.

As leaders, we remain responsive to constant change. That’s just part of our daily work. That’s key to being a good leader. To do so, I believe it is important to change our language and mindset from failure to learning. As we are applying improvement processes, let’s focus on “learn fast, learn often” and shift our language away from failure.

Like most people, I don’t like to fail. And if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s difficult to overcome failure. Failure can have heavy consequences. Think of situations where people fail at their business, fail in school, fail at their jobs. We can overcome failure in doing so. It’s just so difficult when we think about how we overcome failure. We have to overcome it, but it’s so difficult to do when we think about those situations.

In our daily work, we are not going to achieve all that we desire. This to me, however, is not failure. It’s actions we take that we can learn from. We are working toward excellence, and it’s not always going to work in the way that we want it to, but we’re continuing to learn through an iterative process of engagement and conversation around evidence. There are daily outcomes that always drive improvements. When we’re at our best as leaders, we are constantly looking for ways we can get better, and we can drive with supporting our teams to always get better.

How? We apply repeatable and systematic processes to learn from. Therefore, let’s apply an iterative process to “learn fast and learn often.” Let’s embed that mindset in our culture and act on it.

In summary, what do we mean by “learn fast, learn often?” We lead our teams to engage in an iterative learning process to demonstrate something has changed that leads to improved results. When we do, we will provide our best to students so that they have every opportunity to be at their best.

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Thank you for connecting to our show today. I hope today’s thoughts give you some food for thought. And I hope you join us next week as we continue to focus on the Nine Principles Framework so that we can all be our best at work. Have a great week, everyone.