By David Mullins, Founding Partner
A question I often ask myself is “Am I prepared to fail?”. Failure can be looked upon as shameful and unpalatable and yet without failure valuable learning opportunities are missed and success can be fleeting.
Being prepared to fail means not only must we desire to take the risk itself (am I prepared to endure failure on my path to success) but secondly, do I know the steps I will take if a particular action is not successful. If I am not prepared to take the risk itself then I make no progress and if I am not prepared to act once I have failed, the lessons I’ve learned are of little more than theoretical benefit. These states of preparedness are related to each other.
The bigger the risk the harder it is to know what we will do when things go wrong.
In the context of digitisation there are many opportunities to take small risks and learn an enormous amount. Good software development is centred around repeating the process of building, testing and breaking. The same concept can be applied to digitising a business process. How rarely does a visionary understand the desired end state and plot the course such that the plan was perfect from the start? More often we are left with an enormous gap between ambition and outcome but are asked to live with unexpected and unwanted outcomes.
The true innovators of this world know that the only way to make progress is to take some small but concrete steps.
We must be prepared for the outcome of each step whether successful or unsuccessful, with a plan to move forward no matter what.
At TechniCap, our philosophy of progressive digital transformation turns small steps in a small and scalable environment into platforms and frameworks that can support a seismic change in how businesses operate.
