If you're aiming to innovate, failure along the way is a given. But can you fail better?

Whether you're rolling out a new product from a city-view office or rolling up your sleeves to deliver a social service in the field, learning why and how to embrace failure can help you do better faster. Smart leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents design their innovation projects with a key idea in mind: ensure that every failure is maximally useful.

In Fail Better, Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn show how to create the conditions, culture, and habits to systematically, ruthlessly, and quickly figure out what works in three steps:

Launch every innovation project with the right groundwork
Build and refine ideas and products through iterative action
Identify and embed the learning

Fail Better teaches you on how to design your efforts to test the boundaries of your thinking, explore crucial interdependencies, and find the factors that can shift results from just acceptable to groundbreaking - or even world-changing.

Practical instructions intertwined with compelling real-world examples show you how to:

Make predictions and map system relationships ahead of time so you can better assess results
Establish how much failure you can afford
Prioritize project activities for disconfirmation and iteration
Learn from every action step by collecting and examining the right data
Support efficient, productive habits to link action and reflection
Distill, share, and embed the lessons from every success and failure

You may be a Fortune 500 manager, a scrappy start-up innovator, a social impact visionary, or simply leading your own small project. If you aim to break through without breaking the bank - or ruining your reputation - this book is for you.

Kara Penn

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