We Tried That
Past results are not indicative of future results.
A common logical fallacy is claiming something won’t work because a previous attempt failed.
Why It’s A Crutch
People often look to previous failures to set their future course for several reasons, including:
Ego. If I couldn’t do it, nobody can.
Negativity bias. Failure hurts, and people often want to avoid risking it again, to a fault.
Ignorance. People just don’t know how things could be different.
Let’s talk about why trying again often works.
Things Have Changed
Especially if there has been a long time between attempts, people often underestimate how much has changed.
Maybe five years ago the company tried a product rebrand, but the number of things to update in the UI ended up causing them to abandon it for other priorities. You might nix the idea of a rebrand if it came up again today, but you’d fail to realize that a whole design system was implemented in the interim, and the level of effort is an order of magnitude less.
New leaders, people, processes, teams, and architecture all contribute to a changing environment that can make very similar attempts yield wildly better results.
Different People Get Different Results
People often undercount their personal contribution to previous failures. Oftentimes they say something can’t be done because they tried it, but the main problem was their leadership, skills, or often their own personal interest level.
New ownership over a project can make all the difference. Just because I missed a three pointer doesn’t mean it can’t be done. If you hire Steph Curry, you should start shooting.
Bad Pattern Matching
Sometimes people claim to have tried a related initiative and failed and then say the new initiative can’t work.
Maybe your team tried to sell an AI product and customers didn’t like it. So someone proposes a new one and a leader says “our customer base isn’t ready for AI products.”
Upon discovery, you find that the original product was a high complexity, high integration product, and the new proposal is a simple LLM tool to check customers’ work. These are absolutely not the same product. If you’re claiming a previous failure is prior art, you need to be sure the past failure and new attempt are almost exactly the same.
Success Is Multifaceted
Often it actually requires all of the above things to change for the opportunity to now be available.
Think of a key opening a lock - many people say “we tried pushing several pins up and it didn’t work”. Well, to open a lock you need to push all the pins up in the exact right way at the same time.
People often seriously struggle to see interconnected problems in this way. Take the example of revamping a component of your compensation philosophy. To change your whole equity program, you might need:
A lack of stock dilution pressure on your public company, or a very high private valuation, to provide the budget to bridge the transition between systems with strategic grants
A compensation leader who can do a person-by-person analysis of how to transition
Heads-of-functions are are invested enough to partner on communication and enablement
20 other things related, necessary conditions to be in place.
If you tried before and half of those ingredients weren’t there, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
When Previous Failure Informs Future Efforts
When you are going to not do something new because of previous results, you should try to distill down your learnings to the most concise and granular statements possible.
“We tried to sell a product like this before” is not a concise statement. There’s about 10,000 variables from pricing and packaging to feature set and more that could impact a product selling or not.
Examples of precise learnings:
Cross-team changes without direct leadership sponsorship and involvement often fail.
The probability of project failure increases, sometimes extra-linearly, as the duration goes over 1 year.
Most US customers are unwilling to spend more than about $10k on our product unless they have metrics they can report to their bosses on the impact to their business.
X technology is not a good fit for our Y workload.
Summary
People bias towards avoiding the scene of prior failures. But you must analyze where the failure was and think specifically about its implications.
A good heuristic for if you’re over-biasing on previous failures is is that if you’re deciding a high volume of new initiatives based on old failures, you’re being too general and don’t really understand why it didn’t work.
It’s also always good to remember what must be done as a business. Sometimes you find people with failure-bias saying things like “we’ll never reduce support” or “we’ll never make this cost effective.” But those are things that you absolutely must do as a business, and realizing that highlights the inadequacy of their failure bias.
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