At X, Failure Is Not an Option: It's a Feature (Astro Teller's 2016 TED Talk) (backchannel.com)

New submitter Evan Hansen writes: Everyone likes to pays lip service to "fail fast," but when was the last time your boss gave you a bonus when your project was killed? In his 2016 TED Talk, concluded just moments ago, Astro Teller, the head of Alphabet's X R&D lab shares some never-before revealed stories of his team's failures and iterations, and explains how "fail fast" can be more than a trite cliche. The first X project was the self-driving car, and subsequent ones include Google Glass, Project Loon's Internet service via balloon, Makani energy kites, and a drone delivery service dubbed Project Wing.

Comments

It's good to be an elite

[DNS-and-BIND]

Man, it has got to be great being at the top. Where you can fail and nobody will fire you for it. In the rest of the world, when you are associated with a failed project, that puts you first in line the next time layoffs come around. That almost happened to me once, but luckily I smelled it coming and managed to distance myself from my friend who was in charge of the failing project. It broke up our friendship, but I still had a job afterwards and he didn't. So, you could say I "failed fast" in that I quickly determined that my friend had a failure face and I quickly failed to stick with him when times got tough.

But for some reason I was never invited to give a TED talk about it. I wonder why? Oh yeah, I'm a filthy prole, I forgot. Why did Astro Teller get to give a TED talk? Because he's the grandson of Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb. His father was a professor. Stanford couldn't admit him fast enough. He got into Google because Googlers distrust people who are not like themselves. He even gets away with a stupid-ass name like "Astro" where in the rest of the world a name like that will get you swirlies.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[JoeMerchant]

I'm fairly sure your friend's project wasn't a fail-fast investigation, but rather a sure thing development.

I think the best line in the talk was "shifting perspective is more powerful than being smart, if you're coming at an established problem from an established approach, you're competing with all the other smart people who came before you, and that's a terrible place to be competitively." So, what do they do? They try unusual approaches, they fail, they try again, they fail better next time, and most importantly: they identify when they fail to free up resources to try something else.

Yes, it's a deep pockets approach, a lot like Vulture Capital investing, but without the traditional conservative threats of hellfire and damnation when you fail - as most people do most of the time in this type of R&D. VCs praise serial success stories, just like Wall Street glorifies analysts who have gotten it right the past 3 consecutive years... most of these people fail to realize that luck plays into success more than skill - not that you don't need skill to succeed, but simply that luck is a better component.

In an organization like X, they'll have other methods to identify and reward skill besides successful productization of lunatic ideas. As they stressed in the article, identifying objective evidence of failure early in an approach is a valuable skill.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[guruevi]

The problem with firing everyone that makes a mistake is that you create a culture that just goes with IBM/Microsoft/contractor because you can just shift the blame. You spend insane amounts of money without actually innovating or doing anything that progresses your company. In the end your company goes bust because it can't compete with entities that are more agile and are innovators in their market.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[HornWumpus]

And like most things, the sane answer is somewhere in the grey area.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[JoeMerchant]

What I was saying flew right over your head, didn't it? All that education, and you never learned a thing.

Don't worry about it, the stuff they talk about at TED obviously doesn't apply in your life.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[JoeMerchant]

And like most things, the sane answer is somewhere in the grey area.

The sane answer is the boring answer - no risk no reward...

Of course, serious R&D, whether it's insane spoiled children in California today, or gentleman scientists at Bell Labs in the 1950s and 60s, basically requires a lot of input capital... many ideas will fail to prove their worth, and once in awhile you'll get something like the transistor.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[shawn2772]

Man, it has got to be great being at the top. Where you can fail and nobody will fire you for it. In the rest of the world, when you are associated with a failed project, that puts you first in line the next time layoffs come around.

This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.

But when you're breaking new ground, trying to do things that have never been done before, if your management expects success, they're idiots. I grant that lots of companies are led by idiots, but that doesn't make them any less wrong. Google is where it is precisely because its leadership understands that failure is always possible, and the more audacious the goals the more likely it is that you'll fail. When you're pushing the envelope, true failure isn't when the project stumbles and falls due to some major technological obstacle. It's when you fail because of something you really could have foreseen... or when you fail to learn from your failure.

Google has a culture of post mortem analyses to ensure that that last sort of failure doesn't happen. Whenever anything goes seriously wrong, a detailed analysis of what went wrong, and when, and why, is conducted. Not with the goal of identifying people to blame, but to determine what lessons can be learned and what can be done to ensure that failure doesn't happen again. For someone who grew up outside of the Google culture, it's pretty terrifying to go through your first post mortem, for something you built. It's hard not to be defensive. After a few times, though, you begin to internalize the fact that unless the cause was you just not doing your job, you have nothing to worry about and may well come out with kudos or even a bonus.

He got into Google because Googlers distrust people who are not like themselves.

I got into Google as a 42-year old graduate of a podunk little four-year state school that no one has heard of, with an unaccredited CS program. I can't comment on whether I'm like the typical Googler, because I'm not sure what that is. Aside from the well-publicized issues around gender and race, which exist across nearly all tech companies, it's a very diverse place (note that race and gender diversity are important, but they're far from the only forms of diversity). The "Stanford MSCS" is well-represented, of course, but I work with one engineer who has only an associate degree and another who got his GED at age 29 and never attended college at all.

He even gets away with a stupid-ass name like "Astro" where in the rest of the world a name like that will get you swirlies.

Very true. All sorts of quirkiness is accepted and even embraced at Google. That's one of the things I most enjoy about working here.

Re: It's good to be an elite

[Anonymous Coward]

I think part of the OP's frustration is that when you have nearly unlimited funds to pursue concepts it can be hard to differentiate between the inertia of a successful idea and the mileage you're getting just by pouring funds into something.

I'd be more interested in hearing a TED talk from a scrappy team that was successful with self or minimal funding. The information would certainly be applicable to a larger subset of teams.

Re:It's good to be an elite

[Ol Olsoc]

The stuff they talk about at TED doesn't apply to anyone's life. TED is hot air, fluff, and pie-in-the-sky bullshit. It's a fucking joke!

My favorite TED talk

: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The talk itself is some self indulgent stuff about how she came to believe that there is a God. But irony abounds!

http://gawker.com/professional...

This new reformed woman had a bit of a road rage incident, followed a 73 year old woman home, ran over her with her car, then started to back up to run over her again but fortunately was stopped.

I haven't looked at TED talks the same way ever since .

Re:It's good to be an elite

[swb]

This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.

Who's the "you" in this? Any computer system project that is sufficiently embedded in business process has failure modes so far outside the reach of anyone on the technical side that blaming technical people for it is incredibly myopic. They often end up failing even when the technology works right.

And almost all of this is beyond the reach any single individual who's not a senior manager and then there are still conceptual problems with where blame ought to be assigned. And once you get into "you" as a team/group, often with differentiated roles and responsibilities, where failure modes can vary widely.

I work for a small IT consultancy and I work on projects where all kinds of problems crop up. Most don't cause the project to "fail" (even when they go badly, I think there are various organizational and individual reasons for resisting declaring failure) but even when I'm the sole implementer of the project, there are failure reasons that go beyond me. Poor scoping. Client interference. Unrealistic timelines. Inadequate resources. The list is long and full of things I had no control over.

Google Glass?

[93 Escort Wagon]

The inventor of Google Glass either left Google or was asked to leave. But, in either case, I don't see how that fits this narrative.

Re:Google Glass?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably for being a Glasshole.

Start selling!

[__aaclcg7560]

Fail fast works better for sales calls. Talk to as many people as possible to overcome the fear, doubts and frustrations about selling. The faster you fail at selling, the more likely to get a sale.

The fastest failure

[penguinoid]

The fastest failure, is when you don't even start. And no, you're not getting a bonus for that either.

Failure - a learning experience

[colinwb]

The British economics commentator Hamish McRae once wrote about a bright young executive put in charge of a project which subsequently failed: he tried to resign but was told by a superior that he had just been through an expensive training course in what not to do, and that if he thought that he could leave and take that knowledge to a competitor he had better think again.