Fail forward. That’s a popular montra we hear and I believe it. Unfortunately I think that we are in danger of too quickly glossing over the “forward” part of the idea. It Is important to take a hard look at your failures, get context, find insight, and share the new found wisdom. Here are a few questions that I like my team to answer whenever there is an opportunity to learn and grow from a less optimal outcome.

What was the action taken and what was the result?
What might have been a more preferred result?
What was the specific lesson learned?
How could we identify a similar situation in the future?
What behavior is recommended for the future?
Who needs to be informed about this lesson to ensure a more preferred result?

The progression of questions take you from recalling the action, analyzing the action, determining new lessons, and deciding who needs to have this knowledge.

Try it for yourself and for your teams.

I now have three “primary” computing devices: a MacBook pro, an iPad, and an iPhone. The gap at is immediately apparent to me, and that I think is an interesting opportunity is the disconnect of the user experience moving between each of the devices.

The individual devices have great UX. But as I move from one form factor to another most apps make the UX feel disconnected.

Example: I use an IM application on all devices. But if I start s conversation on my MacBook and then pick up my iPad to go into the living room, or my iPhone to run to the store my conversation is broken. The chat history does not follow me, and even worse, multiple devices will remain logged on so a new IM will register on multiple devices.

I think with all of the new and innovative form factors now finding adoption momentum, there is a good opportunity for frameworks to be built to support the movement of the UX in a seamless way across devices.

Pushing data into the cloud, or having a good sync system is a great start, and I’d love if my various apps had better sync capabilities. But can we sync the UX of applications. Can product developers break out of the paradigm of an application living in a single instance of a process. Can UX be elevated to it’s own entity with app instances being merely a view into the current session.

Should my word processor always start from zero when I open it? Or should it return to it’s previous state? If I’m editing a blog post on my laptop and I decide to move to my iPad, should I dare to expect to continue where I left off seamlessly?

It’s a hard problem to solve from a logic perspective, and its a lot of plumbing to write for app developers. Maybe someone will think through the business rules and create a framework we can all build on.

If you are that person, I’d love to talk with you and support you. What do you all think?

For me, maintaining a digital life is a difficult thing to do. Between work, family, spirItuality, and personal time how can I maintain an effective online presence? And, is it worth it?

I’ve recently revived this blog and have attempted to be more active on my Facebook account. And, we’ll have to see about Twitter.

For me, my favorite online outlets are this blog and online forums. There are personal relationships and reputations on both, but the knowledge sharing is so much deeper than short posts and status updates. But alas, responding to people in depth and writing something interesting is time consuming. That’s probably why Facebook is so popular, it’s easy and mostly brainless.

I know it’s worth it though. There is a level of intrinsic satisfaction to it, though with such a large amount of noise out there it can be painful to curate.

I have a Money Tree in my office. I’ve had it since I moved AdPropel into it’s own facility. It’s a resilient plant and has aged well. The tree is in a nice red pot, has five “tunks” that are twisted together, and grows leaves in bunches of six.

Of the five trunks, three of them used to be alive with leaves sprouting. Now,  only one trunk is left sprouting leaves and it’s flourishing, all the others have died. This tree reminds me of a lesson about starting a business. A lesson about focusing resources and not being pulled in all directions. About how some ideas and ventures will eventually fail, and how by staying in there, eventually one idea will flourish and grow.

Growing a startup isn’t about taking on many goliath’s in parallel. It’s about nurturing the most promising ventures and then building from that success. Create leaves, not trunks.

I think this short post from Seth Godin is important, especially from the perspective of a startup company. In a startup, the “self-starter” attitude and ability to be self-sufficient is all the more important. There is no formal management structure, few processes, and when the company is being created it takes mindshare and individual action to get things off the ground.

The relentless search for “tell me what to do” 

If you’ve ever hired or managed or taught, you know the feeling.

People are just begging to be told what to do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is: “If you tell me what to do, the responsibility for the outcome is yours, not mine. I’m safe.”

When asked, resist.