One of the big issues I always find with "Closed Lost Reasons"[1] like this is that it rarely captures the truth accurately. It misses the truth in a couple of ways: 1. Deliberate obfuscation by main actors who want to protect their jobs ("It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when their salary depends on their not understanding it.")
2. Continental drift- the farther you get from the action (or, more likely, the set of actions) that precipitated the event, the more you rely on memory and hearsay
3. "The Rage to Conclude"- humans LOVE denouement, to “know”, to have things wrapped up and make sense. But rarely is the world so simple. We try to boil a set of reasons down into one über-reason
So on the factory floor, the people doing the labeling are incentivized to shift the blame and obfuscate their role in the loss. And then the manager is trying to sort through all the noise to identify which set of reasons is the most likely for this loss. There's a lot lost in translation from the "truth" of how the deal was actually lost.------------------ With this particular article, I categorize it in "content marketing babble": advice that is generalized to the point that it is not useful to me. The Common Lessons section leaves me with general advice but no tractable ways to understand what that looks like in the real world with real constraints and stresses. IMO, the Lean: validation section could be extremely valuable IFF they supplied hard examples from the failed startup dataset that fueled this article. Like "Here are links to the case studies where the team behind [Closed Company A] felt that they could have spent more time validating before building. This is the featureset that they built prematurely, and here they ponder on ways they might have tested it cheaply" ------------------ All that aside: I've actually been quite an avid reader of Failory for a couple of months now. I check in every so often to go over new interviews. I think the interviews (https://www.failory.com/interview-failure) are a lot more useful: the format allows for more nuance, more context over the conditions of the business, and more reflection. I often find myself wanting to ask more questions in-line to the interviewee, kind of like a hyperspecific, morbid Quora question. [1] I'm co-opting this term from Sales/Marketing lingo. I originally wrote Root Cause Analysis, but I know that RCA has a very specific software definition and set of rituals, so I wanted to |
Sure. There is mal-adaptive behavior, and it's not consequence free.
>rarely captures the truth accurately
Accurately? There's nothing going on in your reply to suggest you have distinguished insight to anything. Throwing out three more modalities of problems amounts to what-aboutism. You have attempted to re-contextualize the original write-up as disingenuous something we see a lot of pointless political wrangling.
The salient question is what we can agree on as to common failure modes, rather than that argue without intersection. No accounting can be complete, and beyond some level of specificity more detail is useless. We're looking for 20% of the causes that explain 80% of the bad outcomes. Think Chaos Report that had a good run in the 1990s.