Rachel Sterne is not a failure. She created and managed the famously innovative GroundReport, which rewrote the rules for online citizen journalism, and last January was appointed Chief Digital Officer of New York City by Mayor Bloomberg. She is 27 years old.

Ari Wallach is not a failure. He runs a New York consultancy company called Synthesis Corp. which provides “strategic counsel at the intersection of memes, technology and innovation”. Er, yes, presumably to people who know what that means… Amongst other clients, he was doing this for CNN last January. He is renowned among online political geeks as the creator of the memorable “Great Schlep” vote-getting campaign for Barack Obama, featuring Sarah Silverman.

Bryan Sivak is not a failure. He was, until falling victim to the US habit of reappointing entire administrations when there is a change at the top, Chief Technology Officer for the District of Colombia, fêted as a leader in the world of “Gov 2.0″.

Joe Rospars is not a failure. He is founder and CEO of Blue State Digital a top political/tech consultancy  and was previously New Media Director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. However, his track record as a political online innovator goes back further than that, to the Howard Dean presidential run in 2004. That’s prehistory in this sector – he’s a bit like the guy who remembers doing the first cave paintings.

So why do these four eminiently successful individuals feature in a blog post with “failure” in its title? Simple: each and every one of them quite independently extolled the virtues of failure to us at our meetings in Washington and New York City.

Fans of failure: (clockwise from top left) Bryan Sivak, Rachel Sterne, Ari Wallach, Larry Page, Joe Rospars

America is of course famously, notoriously even, the country which loves a winner. Not for the Yanks that oh-so-British admiration for the “gallant loser”, they just have plain “losers”, also probably the most cutting insult which can be delivered by one American to another.  Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards (check the link, you under 35s!) could never have been an American… But we’re not talking about losers here, we’re talking about failures.

Never in America: Eddie the Eagle

All came up with variants on the theme, but perhaps the most succinct version – the one that stuck in our collective mind was from Bryan Sivak: “Fail often, fail quick, fail cheap”. However expressed, the concept was always the same; in the digital communications business, where entry barriers are generally quite low, one of the great benefits is that it is easy to try things out, and the cost of failure is  generally not too high. If your experiment doesn’t work out, it is quite easy to backtrack, learn the lessons, and try something else. Indeed, it is necessary have have a string of failures under your belt, that is the way you learn, it’s a pre-requisite of online innovation and creativity.

“Fail often, fail quick, fail cheap”

The provisos are important too, of course. “Quick” is not only about the speed with which you fail, but the speed at which you perceive the failure and correct. What that implies is high sensitivity to user feedback, the mental flexibility to accept that your idea hasn’t worked out and a certain frankness with your users/clients. “Cheap” refers, obviously, the monetary investment you make in an idea (budgets, in our case), but also points to a methdology – the idea that development should be undertaken where possible in short incremental, reversible steps. The “big bang”, the comprehensive relaunch, is simply not the smart way to operate on the web, not only because it locks you into a potentially expensive idea which may turn out to be ill-conceived, but also because fashion is fickle and even a well-conceived idea might fall by the wayside. “Often” (not “indefinite”, note!) is about persistence and, yes, optimism. Keep trying, your breakthrough will come…

All this reminds me of another successful American, one whose success, I suppose, puts even those I have cited in the shade. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, visited the European Parliament last year and held an open Q&A session with Parliament staff who were interested (nice touch, I thought, to meet the staff).  The visit happened to coincide with a bout of angst over the failure (or at least non-success, ah!) of the so-called Lisbon Agenda, Europe’s plan to become the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. Many questions were asked by Europeans puzzling over the terrific pace of innovation in US-based tech firms. Page’s answers were all about failure…

His case was simple, Silicon Valley produces so much innovation because of a combination of three vital factors: 1) a highly-educated, highly motivated, creative environment, 2) plenty of money available from investors for start-ups (which, helpfully, do not in this trade require huge amounts of cash to get going), and 3) a high tolerance for failure, a tolerance based moreover on the realisation that “failure” is in any cases only an stepping stone, a learning process, towards success.

It sounds bright-eyed and utopian to a jaded European mind, perhaps, but then that’s perhaps the reason it appears to work well in the US and less well in the EU.

Look for people who are interested in doing their job, not in not losing their job

In any case, the cultural effects of an attachment to risk taking and failure were more than evident during our visit to the States. It is hard to think of an interlocutor we met who had been in his/her job for more than a year or two. Even those who had more constancy (Sree Sreenivasan in academia, for example) had seemingly  dozens of sidelines going at the same time, and a varied past career . To put it simply, the Americans seemed generally pretty cool about changing jobs at startlingly regular intervals, both in the public and private sectors, and, in several cases between them. One revealing comment we heard, from Ari Wallach, was an enjoinder to us to look for “people who are interested in doing their job, not in not losing their job”. The clear implication is that to do your job well, and we were talking in the context of tech/internet jobs, is at the same time to risk it, by trying things that might not work, by being ready to fail. (At least if you are working for Ari Wallach, one supposes, this also makes you less likely to lose your job, though arguably more likely to be headhunted by a competitor.)

Remember too, that remarkable observation from Sree Sreenivasan that most of his students were entering employment with organisations which didn’t exist two years ago.

Sree Sreenivasan

Obviously, there is scope here for a huge discussion about American versus European culture, about competitiveness, security, social policy, individualism, solidarity, sustainability, growth, happiness v. wealth and much much more. Needless to say, I haven’t the slightest intention of going there. Where however I do want to go is to think about (i) the implications for running a tech/communications operation and (ii) the impact on the broader communications environment we inhabit.

It is probably best to start with the environment, and simply to point out the globalised nature of the online communications world. Though it may be true to say that Europe adopts new online trends somewhat after they have taken off in the USA, with cultural and language factors holding them up for a while, it is also true that their ultimate absorption on this side of the Atlantic is practically inevitable. (This is indeed the main reason one might consider it useful to visit the USA in this context in the first place.) It suffices to consider the extent to which any European’s contemporary internet experience, and indeed wider media consumption, is dominated by innovations from US companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook and Twitter. It would be illusory to think that the kind of communications environment – including the new world of journalism represented by the likes of Slate, Politico, National Journal, Huffington Post et al, or indeed Facebook and Twitter themselves – which these technological innovations have created, will not also be created in Europe, albeit with some cultural tweaks.

Competitive pressures may play out differently in Europe, but the ultimate patterns of cause and effect seem pretty similar

The transition is visible in the Brussels press corps even now, with a younger, striving generation, struggling with the tough economics of modern journalism, which are denying them the sorts of jobs occupied by their older confreres, turning to a multitasking, highly digitised version of their trade to make their way. Competitive pressures may play out differently in Europe, but the ultimate patterns of cause and effect seem pretty similar.

(In passing, and fundamentally in support of the technology-drives-communications-environment argument, let it be said that there is one striking counter-example to the overall dominance of the US in technological innovation, mobile GSM technology, an example of a superior common standard, set early, creating a competitive advantage. This example was cited by several of our US interlocutors, perhaps trying to be polite, but seemingly also genuinely frustrated by having to play catch-up for once. That said, the pithiest expression of this frustration pointed not to Europe, but to the technological leapfrogging engaged in by emerging economies: “one day,” said our interloctor, ” we may have mobile communication technology at the level of Ghana.”)

But to return to our main thread, what does a failure-is-good ethos imply for an operation such as ours in the European Parliament?

It need hardly be said that such an ethos is antithetical to that prevailing not only in the EU institutions but in public administrations worldwide. There are many good reasons for such organisations to have a prudent, steady-as-she-goes modus operandi. Few citizens would welcome public administrations making up new rules as they go along, obsessing in general about fads, fashions, “memes, technology and innovation”, or spending large sums on wild-eyed, experimental schemes. Unfortunately, at least the first two of these things are what a successful digital communications operation – amongst much else – needs to do. Fortunately, as we have seen, the third is not however something which is necessary, as innovation in online communication is not as a rule very, if at all, costly.

The big question therefore, for as long as the European Parliament is expected to communicate effectively online, hence essentially to communicate at all, is of how to replicate something of the failure-is-good ethos inside the organisation. How do we build a spirit of risk-taking, of innovation, of creativity, of acceptance that failure is part of success, in our organisation? Perhaps the most important lesson from America is that we have to make these things happen if we are, in the parlance, to stay in the game.

And because these posts are so far about the lessons, not yet the conclusions, I will leave it there.

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Next time: what we’re doing in 1996.