Noemi & I started to brainstorm ways to reach out LOTE5 strategic partners and potential clients. Here’s some inspiration from Antiheroes not-so-fuckedup encounters.
This presentation worked as an appetizer in one of our first attempts in turning FuckUp Nights into a private event for organizations (in this example a Belgian bank). We sent it as an icebreaker to people we already collaborated with in the bank’s incubator and thanks to some other lucky circumstances, like extra attention given by Belgian media covering FuckUp Nights during that week, we got to our first meeting with the bank’s change management team (that led eventually to a private FUN normally to happen in November, currently preparing for one last conclusive meeting).
The Brace For Failure WS series (here below) is our most validated product, mainly appreciated by (pretty traditional) incubators and more edgy design schools/universities. We guess that using tags like FuckUp, Destroy Your Idea and Poor Little Smart Kid was our way to differ from the FAIL2SUCCEED crowd. It was a seemingly accurate guess from the feedback we got, especially from long-lasting public initiatives having hard times gathering a critical mass on the topic.
FuckUp Nights Brussels was our main monthly community builder that pulled people’s attention to our mission of “commiting ourselves to the art of being wrong and of openly talking about failure”. Our next date in on the 10th of September and we’re still on the way to attract this season’s strategic partners… Edgeryders being one of our most welcomed allies.
They are giving a Big Industry reference who rewards failure.
I skipped some of the hot air in the beginning but this might have some more interesting pointers for your company focused approach in the couple of minutes before the link.
I wonder, do you do this service in French as well?
And I am referring both to the disarming honesty of the icebreaker (man, could Edgeryders learn from this – look at it, @Nadia and @Noemi), and to @trythis's video. I do dislike the idea of competitions and prizes (“inducement” in NESTA language), and for the same reason: it’s “off-balance sheet risk taking”, shifting the risk on to someone else.
Oh indeed - you produce 9 losers (or more) for every winner, typically.
Also watch how he skips over the “take all the IP and run” part. In a larger context this is not exactly the final word of generating value. It is sucking out a profit - however at least it often encourages change in a stuck and defunct system.
Further it does not make a lot of use from the opportunities in collaboration. Perhaps that would be something for edgeryders to contemplate: Come in after the show is done, the prize is gone - and connect the right people from the participants in the right way and salvage what value can be found under cc. Perhaps even band up and out-compete the winning team in an open effort.
I think words like brace, destroy, get rid of… don’t make me want to fail. Maybe they shouldn’t. I also dislike fail2succede - this one I dislike more.
But brace, means that I have to put myself against something stronger and wait for impact, hoping for the best. Hoe does something like “spring to failure” sound to you? I don’t have a better solution.
fail2succeede is very bad because it makes me want to succeed. I think that the pdf should make people want to fail and learn about what failure is and how to work with it. Is it still true that we fear what we don’t understand?
Maybe succeede2fail
Destroy also works in this direction. I can destroy something without understanding it, and the point of the paragraph is to look more closely at the idea. But destroying it does not do that. Attacking it, does. Looking at it, poking it, do. I don’t want to make everything sound happy and good. I like the edginess of fuckUp, I just think it can be better.
3rd one is get rid of human error - is this what we want? - I think we should promote human error, look at it, understand it and record it. No?
The difference between the workshops “DESTROY YOUR IDEA” and “PICK YOUR FAVORITE WAY TO FAIL” is that in the first you get ideas on how to fail from the group and the second one you have to envision your own demise? They seam very similar to me. Probably I am missing something out.
There are a lot of things i like in the pdf, all the workshops I would go to and have a great time, fuckup and mess with people, I may be good at it. So, all the critics in this post are only to be discussed, not taken very seriously.
