"[1] The implied promise to employees is that the consequences of failure, if recognized quickly, would not negatively affect a person's position, job or career; a key component of a successful approach requires a corporate culture that not only tolerates but actively encourages and even celebrates failure that results in valuable learning for the organization.
It has been criticized for lack of adherence to that implicit promise, for its risk of creating a culture of mediocrity, and for being overoptimistic about the learning benefits of failure.
The concept and theory that argues businesses should adopt an aggressive and agile trial-and-error process to quickly determine and assess the long-term viability of a product or strategy, recognize that something isn't going well, and make adjustments or move on to something else rather than investing years in a doomed approach.
[1][2] The approach assumes an incremental project development process, with iterative checks to ensure the product or strategy will meet client, consumer or organizational needs before dedicating ongoing investment.
[3][2] In addition, a corporation using such an approach would benefit more quickly from the learnings from past failures, enhancing the likelihood of quicker success on future projects.
[3][6] Carol Bartz discussed a concept she termed "fail-fast forward" in a 2001 speech at Stanford University, describing a system she had implemented at Autodesk to "engineer a company to fail in certain missions, to be resilient to failure, and to respond to it by overcoming quickly".