“I never lose. I either win or learn!” Nelson Mandela once said, showing why losing was not part of his vocabulary. He means that even a defeat has something positive in it – you learn from it and never make the mistakes that led to the defeat again. What sounds so simple is still one of those taboo topics that people don’t want to talk about. Too bad actually! Because others could also learn from the mistakes you have made yourself and then avoid them.
That’s what some founders from Mexico’s startup scene thought when they launched the first Fuckup Nights in 2012 – here, the focus is not on economic successes, but on failures. It’s not about making a quick buck, it’s about bankruptcies. It’s not about the glory of a business idea, it’s about its failure. You learn more from failures than from successes, which is why three to four founders speak publicly about their failures in short 15-minute talks at Fuckup Nights, explaining their approach and pointing out the mistakes in it. The audience can take the opportunity afterwards to ask questions or comment on the story.
Fuckup Nights are now held around the globe in more than 320 cities from 90 countries. It takes a lot of courage to get up on stage and break a taboo, but it’s worth it, because this is the only way to create a culture of error in the long term, which can be a driver of digital transformation!
If you want to master the digital transformation, long planning and waterfall methodology are out of place and an agile approach is required instead. That’s because new technologies live at an unprecedented speed and expect the same from their peers, who must adapt just as quickly.
Instead of looking for the error that caused the project to fail at the end of the project, iterative work should be done and much more the product than the project should be tackled and this should also be questioned and realigned again and again – of course, errors also happen here, but these can be corrected immediately and a failure can be prevented.
Because mistakes are allowed to be made, many companies have now made this explicit in their corporate culture and thus contribute to a functioning error culture – faster responsiveness on the market is the reward. Fostering a culture of error like this is possible with “Fuckup Nights.”
