Beat Your Failures – A Great Approach
Diligent and accurate and, best of all, flawless. No failures at all. This is the culture that is lived especially here in Germany or even in the whole of Europe.
In itself, there is nothing reprehensible about it, it is rather praiseworthy that perfection is always pursued and laziness and disorganization are not “well-seen”.
Of course, at this point Bill Gates could come around the corner again and claim that the “laziest” people find the smartest solutions, but I think we all know that this does not generally apply to all areas.
That said, I was very amazed by Trevor Hubbard’s presentation and his methodology that he started back in the day with Butchershop and has followed until today.
They call the whole approach “Beat Failure” and they also follow exactly this wording, because instead of always striving for perfection and identifying the success factors, they specifically elicit the factors that could fastly turn tables to a bad extent.
So the question asked is, what could happen in the worst case scenario, in the event of a failure, nevermind if it is a failure of the product or service.
From this, it is then derived what measures can be taken in advance and also during the ongoing process to completely eradicate this failure or at least reduce the extent of it if it should actually occur.
I was very surprised at myself, how simple one gets stuck in his old thought patterns and while I kept thing about this approach and its measures, I realized that might not have acted as efficiently in them as I could have.
It is essential to constantly question your own approaches and to be open to new great ideas.
Why not confronting your customers fear by just looking directly at the pain points and clearly define the concerns? Of course, no one wants to go there, because these issues cause discomfort and unease for everyone. But that’s exactly what we want to cushion in projects, or rather prevent completely, so that these cases which we are “afraid” of never happen.
Away from the should-have-been to the what-if. So simple and yet so effective.
There are so many methodologies for figuring things out, presenting them, deriving them, and presenting them, but it’s always nice to see new ideas being floated here as well. Admittedly, it’s not rocket science and everyone has already thought about it or tried it out, but I would still like to motivate you to always question your own toolbox to see if you can expand your know-how somewhere.
Shoutout to Trevor Hubbard and his team from Butchershop for this change of perspective.
In the meantime, the company from San Francisco also has branches in Vienna and Munich, take a look by yourself.
