"It's your fault, really. You're the one who told us to prototype." A CEO friend of mine, with whom I've been discussing the merits of low-res prototyping and rapid iteration in the context of his public company, jokingly placed the blame upon me for a failed scaling effort today. He runs a company of several hundred retail locations, and was scaling up a new service that had been successful in a test market.

It struck me how quickly teams can go from a humble "fast test to see what works" mode to a (comparatively) bold, "lock it into the operational machinery" mode. But that shift fails to appreciate the number variables that need to be tested in like manner. With an entirely new concept, it's a little more natural to start with the expectation of failure, and to be prepared to put out fires in order to succeed, rather than start with the expectation of instant success. Though, truth be told, even a modest expectation of failure is a victory in and of itself.

But what this leader jokingly revealed is how quickly we want to move past the "expect failure" phase to the "expect success" phase. This is especially tricky when interfacing with established operational infrastructure that's used to executing at a very high level of reliability and success. The truth is, new ideas are great, AND they're not, and the job of an exploratory mission (which is effectively what early pilot and scaling efforts are) is to figure out HOW they're not great as quickly as possible, and make those things not so not-great.

The conversation reminded me of something shocking that Ed Catmull often says about Pixar movies: "...Early on, all of our movies suck. That's a blunt assessment, I know, but I make a point of repeating it often, and I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first version of our films really are. I'm not trying to be modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, 'from suck to not-suck.' This idea—that all the movies we now think of his brilliant work, at one time, terrible—is a hard concept for many to grasp."

- Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.

To take an idea "from suck to not-suck" requires a consistent attitude of "this will probably fail in some way" present at every stage of development. If a team preserves that attitude, that modest expectation of failure, they're likely to be poised to spring on opportunities for improvement, rather than be discouraged by the inevitable setback.

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