It might sound counterintuitive but fast failure isn’t fatal – it’s affirming.

Knowing that we can measure almost anything today is both liberating and annoying! When it comes to the built environment, we are susceptible to measuring what we see in front of us. The visual, financial, and physical outputs are sometimes so alluring that we don’t necessarily dig deep enough to understand what will actually influence the outcome. 

Establishing effective metrics can help you to ask the right questions of your team and answer the right questions for your project. 

They also help to avoid the conundrum: If I don’t look, I won’t see. If I don’t ask, I won’t know. 

By adopting a holistic approach to measuring project progress and outcomes - beyond the surface level time, cost, quality metrics - you can move more confidently towards a built environment that is more responsible and considerate of its resources and impacts, and ultimately more successful. 

Where does this confidence come from? 

It comes through the considerations for what a project must do for its end users as well as a clear appreciation for its impact on the environment and the team and stakeholders involved in implementing it. Once you’ve defined and agreed on these measures of success, they can inform every step of the design and delivery process. 

Not to say that you want to stifle creativity or limit your flexibility to adapt to the circumstances around you. But you do want to have a framework with tangible measures in place and consciously work within these or deliberately deviate when required.    

Value-based metrics such as the quality of design or future social impacts are often difficult to quantify and therefore require careful negotiation upfront. It is exactly this negotiation that we are after. It helps to lift the lid on what the project vision is seeking to achieve and the value placed on this mission. 

By assigning metrics, this agreement can take the form of numbers, or at least something quantifiable that team members and stakeholders can more readily understand and know when they have achieved.

An interesting test is to take each of the agreed measures in turn. For example: what if you focused exclusively on quality metrics? Where might this move your project? Now take cost, and so on. How might your project differ when viewing these measures in isolation versus in combination? This is a great way to establish some red lines and to flesh out what different members of your team or organisation mean when they say cost or quality is important to them. 

Humility and flexibility go a long way to putting the right metrics in place and continually checking in with how they’re serving the best interests of the project.

I hold a vision that one day, key members of a project team, at any stage, will be able to understand where the project is in relation to the desired outcomes and will therefore be able to contribute more effectively to its success. This desire comes from a frustration that the metrics and the supporting information that feeds its very existence, typically sit with very few people within a project. 

It is precisely this lack of curated visibility that leads to poor communication and decision-making.

I completely understand the need to control how project information is disseminated across a team and outwardly to stakeholders. It’s important to audit its accuracy and to validate its meaning. I also know that a healthy tension should exist between design teams and the client - to balance trade-offs between time, cost, quality, and social measures. This creates an environment where designers can challenge the brief and clients can challenge the response. Which is absolutely essential. But I believe that you can achieve this whilst also allowing greater transparency of project progress to key members of the wider team. 

Projects that are pushing boundaries to transform people’s lives for the better have an element of risk. This is inevitable, but it is possible to proactively mitigate these risks. 

If you create an environment, and better still a culture, where proactive risk mitigation and fast failure are incentivised, it can lead to breakaway success. By celebrating bravery and being on the front foot in terms of mitigating foreseeable risks, you will build more collective courage and greater awareness for taking on calculated risks that benefit the project. 

What is fast failure?

In the product development world, it is talked about as minimum viable products that are continually tested and tweaked through accepting multiple small failures in order to realise refined and successful product outcomes. It might be easier to imagine why this is a valid approach for a product rather than a building. But its principle can genuinely be useful in the built environment too. 

Failing fast can take the form of testing concepts with physical or virtual models or at later development stages with prototyping. If you take the example of virtual or real-time models, they allow rapid testing of ideas in a low cost and no risk digital space. It can provide a wide audience with a more comprehensive understanding of the emerging proposals - so that they can help test and contribute to its more refined outcome.

Without question, this approach needs to be handled with great care. In fact with great leadership.

When led appropriately, fast failure can significantly cut design and decision-making time, as well as the associated costs. It can open up opportunities for greater communication within the team and spark innovation too. 

Are you measuring effective metrics that genuinely move your project forward without stifling creativity or innovation? What aspects can you allow to fail fast - then tweak and refine?

I am keen to spark conversations for leaders within the built environment. I have written a book that is intended as a pragmatic blueprint to support courageous leaders in pursuit of high-quality project outcomes.

Our industry has some amazing opportunities and challenges ahead, that can use collective wisdom. You can check out my new book BUILD SUCCESS or follow me with the links below. 

Enabling your success!