How to Recognize Failure Patterns: How HP Quit and Apple Won

Recognizing failure patterns is the closest thing an innovator has to seeing the future.

If you can recognize the patterns, you can change the future, because most failures are not original. They repeat, and that repetition is the pattern: the same handful of patterns reappearing in one organization after another, decade after decade.

This one stings a little.

In 2011, Bill Geiser told me, almost word for word, how the project we had spent the past two years building was going to fail. He saw the pattern before I did; I heard him say it, and I never forgot it.

The failure still happened.

This is not a pre-mortem. A pre-mortem imagines new ways your plan could fail. Recognizing failure patterns means learning from failures that have already happened elsewhere and spotting the early signals before you repeat them, while there is still time to act.

By the end of this episode, you will have four patterns in your own library, a five-minute way to check any project against them, and the four steps to take when you find one.

Let's get into it.

The Smartwatch We Killed In 2004, Fossil hired a watch-technology executive named Bill Geiser to help build innovative technology for their watches. A few years later, he and I started spending real time together, me as HP's CTO, him running watch technology at Fossil. Between us, we had an idea we both believed in: a connected wearable, years before anyone used that phrase, co-innovated by HP and Fossil, with each bringing its expertise.

Fossil named the resulting platform the MetaWatch. It ran an ultra-low-power processor with a 96 by 96 display, an accelerometer, and Bluetooth. It was designed to last a week on a charge, and it shipped with a full developer kit so anyone could build apps for it. We revealed the partnership in March 2011, at an HP event in China. And between us, we had the one thing Apple did not have in 2011: distribution. HP held roughly ten percent of consumer-electronics shelf space. Fossil sold through twenty thousand retail stores that carried its watches.

Bill saw the ending before anyone. He told me in 2011: "Phil, I wouldn't be shocked if Apple evolved the Nano to take advantage of this space. They'll legitimize it in consumers' minds worldwide."

So the man building the watch spotted the failure in advance, out loud. And naming it changed nothing.