Fail Fast, Safely

Definition

Catmull rejects the common framing of failure as a "necessary evil" to be tolerated. His claim is stronger: mistakes "aren't evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new." Since the pain of failure is real and can't be reasoned away, the goal isn't to eliminate the emotional sting but to build processes that catch failures early—while they are still cheap and reversible—so the organization can treat them as learning rather than catastrophe.

In the Book

The chapter opens with an ironic contrast: Toy Story 3's production went unusually smoothly, prompting Steve Jobs to warn Catmull, "Watch out, that's a dangerous place to be." The next two years brought a string of costly misfires—Cars 2 and Monsters University both required replacing their directors, and one film in development for three years was shut down entirely—which Catmull frames as necessary R&D-like investments rather than embarrassments, because they were caught "midstream" before release. He builds out the idea through Andrew Stanton's mantra "fail early and fail fast" and "be wrong as fast as you can," comparing it to learning to ride a bike: falling isn't a detour from learning, it is the mechanism of learning. Catmull also cites the 1975 Golden Fleece Awards, created to shame wasteful government research spending, as a cautionary case: publicly punishing failed experiments had "a chilling effect on research," making people afraid to attempt anything uncertain.

Why It Matters

The insight isn't merely "failure is okay"—it's that punishing or stigmatizing failure changes what people attempt, not just how they feel about outcomes. An organization that treats every misstep as a verdict on competence trains people to avoid uncertain, high-value work in favor of safe, low-value work. Building in mechanisms to surface failure early and cheaply—rather than either avoiding it or discovering it only at the point of public release—is what makes ambitious, original work sustainable rather than a gamble taken once and never repeated.