Fail and Fail Fast

Posted by Shaza Hakim on August 14, 2011

Help employees get their bearing back, send them out there again, then get the hell out of the way.

Shaza shares her take on why companies should permit employees to fail. Shaza is the Creative Lead at Stampede.

Zana wrote a brilliant post earlier today about nurturing creative culture at workplace. Her posts are always very insightful and I want to extend that with how we do things at Stampede.

When we started Stampede some good 5 years ago, Dov and I were still cringing at our share of bad workplace experience. Our goal then was to create a working environment where people not unlike us can do stuffs they really like while actually enjoying each others’ company. My litmus test when I wake up every morning is almost always – “Do I want to go to work today?”

You cannot underestimate the power of working with people you like. If you are an entrepreneur and have the choice, this should be high on your list. Not profit, not product. People.

Which brings me to my next point. So you found a person who is a perfect fit to your company culture. What next?

I think that it is crucial to build a company culture that allows employee to fail and fail fast. Everyone fails. You shouldn’t tiptoe and delay the inevitable. Only by throwing away your reservations and trying things and risking failure, you are able to learn new things. The key point here is moving forward – not to dwell on your failures or repeating the same mistakes. The former is denying yourself of further greatness (and I mean this in every sense of the word) and the latter is just, well, plain lazy. We abhor lazies.

At the speed in which this industry thrives, failing and moving on is a ubiquitous advantage. Never before an outcome of failure can be rectified almost immediately. If it’s beyond repair, be genuine and honest about it. Clients appreciate transparency and only know too well that everyone is fallible to some degree. Get it out of your system, step back and think of another way around it. Nip the negativity in the bud and move the project, and yourself, into positive territory again.

My take – everyone should be permitted to fail. I fail on daily basis, as few dozens half-finished artworks can testify. Dov’s intensity of hacking at his keyboard multiplies when he couldn’t get some code to work. Failure is an acceptable by-product of actually doing something. A good team is built to weather, nay encourage, the education of failures. People will be too scared to try new things if they’re too busy dodging toes.

On the other side of the coin, a company should have a failure-handling mechanism well-oiled and ready. Assure employees that failure is acceptable, help them get their bearing back, send them out there again, then get the hell out of the way.

So fail and fail fast. Then dust yourself off and move on. Rinse and repeat.

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5 Rules for a Creative Culture

Posted by Zana Fauzi on August 13, 2011

“Hire weird people. Interesting.”

Zana is a firm believer in a controlled chaos, a beautiful mess – a situation where everyone is allowed to experiment and fail as long as they get up and learn quickly from it. Zana is the Project Manager at Stampede.

Internet is a fascinating place. It can be where people lurk for prey, scour for a suitor, make new friends, get in touch with people all over the place, or just basically, just to do some plain work – like we at Stampede do. Not having a physical place to work together do not essentially limit our abilities. With all the communication avenues provided over Internet right now, most of the time they make us more productive than the time being concealed inside some office cubes – as long as the culture cultivated is right.

Here are some guidelines by Ben Chestnut, founder of Mailchimp where he grants his employees the permission to be creative:

1. Avoid rules. Avoid order. Don’t just embrace chaos, but create a little bit of it. Constant change, from the top-down, keeps people nimble and flexible (and shows that you want constant change).

2. Give yourself and your team permission to be creative. Permission to try something new, permission to fail, permission to embarrass yourself, permission to have crazy ideas.

3. Hire weird people. Not just the tattoo’d and pierced-in-strange-places kind, but people from outside your industry who would approach problems in different ways than you and your normal competitors.

4. Meetings are a necessary evil, but you can avoid the conference room and meet people in the halls, the water cooler, or their desks. Make meetings less about delegation and task management and more about cross-pollination of ideas (especially the weird ideas). This is a lot harder than centralized, top-down meetings. But this is your job — deal with it.

5. Structure your company to be flexible. Creativity is often spontaneous, so the whole company needs to be able to pivot quickly and execute on them (see #1)

We might not have any written manifesto at Stampede (perhaps we should) but I can confirm that we have done all of these. Especially #3. Yes, that’s right – you should have seen our verbal artistry nearing the end of EST.

(Photo is of Slipknot frontman, Corey Taylor giving a talk to the students at the Oxford Union’s grand hall.)

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