John Griffin is currently paving the way for new explorative ways to bring Design to the forefront of the Ford Credit Europe products. With a background co-founding design consultancies Wolfcub and Pack, he’s spent the last 8 years honing his craft on clients including ASOS, HSBC, Diageo, and Google alongside helping a multitude of start-ups launch their ideas. When John’s not going deep on bringing product ideas to life, you can find him behind the mic podcasting, running the industry event Product Unleashed, or talking about his favorite 80s films to anyone who will listen long enough! Speech Overview: Why are we so afraid for our ideas to fail? Is failure just learning with a bad reputation? The idea of our ideas failing can not only hold us back from making a start on something but can also leave us in an endless loop of all-talk-no-action. For teams to truly be successful, failure needs to move from elephant in the room to engrained within your DNA.

1. Eat -Sleep -
Fail, Repeat.
How to Normalise & Embrace Failure.
John Griffin

3. Failure.

4. I have missed more than 9,000 shots
in my career. I have lost almost 300
games. On 26 occasions I have
been entrusted to take the game
winning shot, and I missed. I have
failed over and over and over again.
And that is why I succeed.
“
Michael Jordan

5. My Name Is John.
And I think our attitude
towards failure is broken.
Hi

6. How do we
define failure?!

7. fail.
to be unsuccessful in achieving your goal.
to neglect to do something.
to not succeed in what you are trying to achieve or are expected to do.
verb

8. Atychiphobia.
the abnormal and persistent fear
of failure, to the degree that it has negative
e
ff
ects on the pattern of one's life.
noun
At-ychi-phobia

9. Manifestations.
Failure
• Reluctance to try new things or get
involved in challenging projects.
• Self-sabotage – for example, procrastination.
• Low con
fi
dence – commonly using negative
statements like “This can’t be done!”
• Perfectionism – A willingness to try only those things
that you know you'll
fi
nish perfectly and successfully.

10. Failure, or the fear of it,
has the power to stop
our ideas in their tracks,
and can make us think
in harmful ways…
I believe…

11. According to a 2018 report from
the Global Entrepreneurship
Monitor, roughly one-third of
wantrepreneurs don’t start a
business because of fear of failure.
“

12. Fail Fast

13. Without the right
understanding, environment,
tools and support, the ‘fail fast’
approach is meaningless.

15. Clouds Judgement.
How Failure...

16. The Fable of the Fox and the Grapes by Aesop is
a powerful example of something called cognitive
dissonance.
The Fox desires a bunch of grapes hanging high
from its vine in a tree. After numerous failed
attempts to get the grapes he “decides” that he
doesn't want the grapes after all.
They are probably sour or not ripe.
The fox’s failure leads to him disassociating with
his desired goal, and rationalising his failure by
criticising or condemning what he set out to obtain.
We ignore the facts.
The Aesop’s fable of the Fox and Grapes.

17. The more we think, talk and plan around
an idea, the more we become naturally
attached.
The idea essentially becomes our ‘baby’.
This leads to us becoming protective of our
idea, and naturally we want to nurture and
grow it, rather than accepting it’s failed
and giving it up!
We become too
attached to our ideas.

18. Once we get settled on a particular idea,
and feel we’ve invested time, energy and
often money into something, it becomes
increasingly hard to stay open to new ideas.
We often become closed o
ff
to external
input, feeling the hard work is done.
We become less
open to new ideas.

19. These are all knock-on
effects of our fear of
failure, and obstacles
we need to recognise.

20. So, is there a‘fear of failure’ silver bullet?
a simple and seemingly magical
solution to a complicated problem.
Silver Bullet
Noun

22. =
+
+

23. Things won’t always go the way
we want, and we have to become
resilient to failure and learn to
embrace it as part of our work!
We have to change
our attitude to
failure because…

24. Not all failures
are created equal.
But...

25. Failure.
Types of...
Within organisations failure
can be categorised into 3 types…

26. Most failures in this category are considered “bad.”
They usually involve deviations from speci
fi
cations
and closely de
fi
ned processes.
With proper training, employees can follow
those processes consistently. When they don’t
inattention, or lack of ability usually results in failure.
Preventable
failures
in predictable operations.
1.

27. Toyota’s manufacturing processes are
in fact responsible for many of the
ways we work today.
They pioneered the lean philosophy
we all know, and introduced
concepts such as Kanban and Kaizen.
Accepting Failure.
Taiichi Ohno: Hero of the Toyota Production

28. Toyota’s culture does not stigmatise failure.
Failure is simply accepted as a way to
determine what can be improved by
cultivating workplaces where problems
can be found and corrected quickly.
Accepting Failure.

29. A particular combination of needs, people,
and problems that may have never occurred
before can cause this type of failure to occur.
For example a hospital emergency room,
responding to enemy actions on the
battle
fi
eld, and running a fast-growing start-
up all occur in unpredictable situations.
Unavoidable
failures
in complex systems.
2.

30. Failures in this category are considered “good”,
because they provide valuable new knowledge
that can help an organisation leap ahead of the
competition and ensure its future growth.
They occur when experimentation is necessary.
Intelligent
failures
at the frontier of new ideas.
3.

31. Failures.
Intelligent
Let’s focus on:

32. Intelligent Failure:
The term “intelligent failure” was coined
by Professor Sim Sitkin of Dukes University
in a Research article into Organisational Behaviour called:
“Learning Through Failure: The Strategy of Small Losses.”

33. The idea behind the concept is simple:
If your organisation can adopt the
concept of intelligent failure, it will
become more agile, better at risk
taking, and more adept at
organisational learning.

34. The 4 characteristics
of intelligent failure.
• It’s carefully planned
• The risks aren’t too great
• The downsides are controlled
• There’s a mechanism for sharing the learnings
The author and strategy leader Rita McGrath
goes on to de
fi
ne intelligent failure by these
characteristics:

35. Failure, if managed well,
can be a very useful thing.
Organisations can’t possibly
undertake the risks necessary for
innovation and growth if they’re not
comfortable with the idea of failing.
“
Rita McGrath

36. Framework.
Failure friendly

37. Design Sprints
Hailing from visionary
Designers within Google
Ventures, Design Sprints are
a 5 day process for testing and
validating ideas in a rapid way.
The framework has been used
across the world in hundreds
of product companies.

38. Design Sprints
Solve big challenges in a week

39. Design Sprints
Fail ?

40. Design Sprint
= Intelligent Failure
• It’s carefully planned
You frame the challenge and do the research + planning at the start.
• The risks aren’t too great
You set the time limit of 5 days, things don’t creep into weeks and months.
• The downsides are controlled
You
fi
nd out if your idea is strong quickly, and if not, you can pivot fast.
• There’s a mechanism for sharing the learnings
You always end a design sprint with a de
fi
nitive way
to move forward and learnings to share.

41. FAILS.
Everybody
Case study

42. In 2004 Facebook grew from 1 million
to 6 million members.
Because of Facebook’s meteoric rise, the
persistent question from Silicon Valley venture
capitalists became “What’s your social strategy?”
In response, Net
fl
ix launched their
social powered feature Friends.

43. The concept behind the feature
was for friends to gain insights into
what each other liked to watch,
driving social engagement and a
delightful experience throughout
the platform.

44. But, after 6 years, trying to get Net
fl
ix
Friends to take o
ff
, the team realised that
they weren’t engaging enough customers,
and that it was time to call it a day.
They quietly retired the feature in 2010.

45. Small wins clouded judgement
The amount of users taking up the feature did grow, just not by enough.
Why did Net
fl
ix persist for so long?
CEO support was strong
The Net
fl
ix CEO really believed in the idea, and that was hard to ignore.
They thought execution was the issue, not the idea
There was so much belief in the idea, they assumed they just weren’t doing it right.

46. Lessons Learnt!
Focus on the idea, not the source
Because the idea had strong CEO support, it got more time and e
ff
ort applied.
Detach from your ideas / Kill ownership
Nobody likes to kill projects. However, passion and hope can cloud judgement.
Take o
ff
the blinkers & ignore sunk costs
Just because you’ve sunk a lot of time and budget into something doesn’t mean you should
carry on, take o
ff
the blinkers and let the facts validate whether you should continue.

47. So, how do we re-wire our
feelings towards failure?

48. FAIL
EXPERIMENT

49. Don't think of it as failure,
think of it as designing
experiments through
which you’re going to learn.
“
Tim Brown

50. Building your
Failure
Experiment
Toolkit

52. Not this…

53. Experiment more Ideas die if you never try them
out, experiment little and often!
• Tell people you’re doing an experiment
to relieve any pressure or expectations.
• Experiments can be very small and iterative.
• Think about how you can prototype an idea to test
with ‘smoke and mirrors’ rather than developing anything.
• Think about the
fi
delity of what you need
to test, how simple can you go?!

56. Change your failure narrative The stories we tell about
failure can be powerful.
• You need to craft the story of what happened,
giving it a beginning, middle and end.
• Talk about what the problem or challenge looked
like and how it was a
ff
ecting your customers.
• Think about what approaches you took
to help solve the problem.
• Think about how you can craft a narrative around
your failure including the value you learnt on the journey.

57. Risks.
Control your...

58. Control your risks To win without risk is to
triumph without glory.
• Don’t put it all on the line. Manage your risks closely.
• Work out how much time / budget / man power
you’re willing to throw at an experiment, and be strict.
• Be transparent about what’s on the line to make
sure everyone is comfortable with the stakes.
• Small risks are easier to manage
compared to bigger ones!

60. Fail together
• Build failure advocates from within your team.
• Align around your methodologies and create
‘fail friendly’ processes which become second
nature.
• Share your highs and lows and normalise
failure as you do so.
• A fail shared feels less personal,
own it collectively!

62. Foster a learning culture Create and reinforce a culture
that makes people feel
comfortable with failure.
• This is often down to leaders, but anyone in
a team can start a fail friendly movement!
• In order for failure to not be a taboo, it
needs to be spoken about often, and
supported from above.
• Think about ways learnings can be shared in a
positive way, without fear of blame and shame.

63. Your concept of failure
might not be too far
removed from the average
person’s idea of success.
“
JK Rowling

64. Happy Failing!
Thank you.

65. Thank you for taking the time
If you have any questions, please reach out.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-griffin-5733ab14
John Griffin