What We Learned about Failure from Launching an Innovation Lab
By: Eric Lam
Tags: Failure, Future Of Work, Design For Good, Tech For Good, Social Impact

In 2020, we set out to create a self-funded initiative that allowed our team to tackle pivotal challenges within our communities, and do it through new approaches. For the past six months, I’ve shared a look inside the makings of Exygy Labs. As the first year of Exygy Labs comes to a close, I’d like to reflect on what this initiative taught us, and share what’s in store for 2021.

Exygy Labs’ First Year

When we officially kicked off Exygy Labs in July, we were entrenched in the COVID-19 pandemic and witnessed an increasing demand for housing resources. Meanwhile, housing front-line workers were struggling to adapt their traditional paper-based workflows into a digital setting. Our team decided to take on this challenge for our first project.

The ethos of our work at Exygy is to remain humble and allow those we want to serve drive the solution. To start, we interviewed multiple housing CBOs to better understand their challenges. In a few short weeks, we were working with two pilot organizations to come up with recommendations for tools and processes that can help them operate more efficiently in a digital environment. We quickly recognized how much team dynamics and culture influences an organization’s ability to adapt new approaches. Our technology recommendations were fairly straightforward, however convincing the teams to change their system of working was more challenging.

As of today, we’ve concluded our work with our pilot organizations, and will follow up in the new year to see what impact — if any — our collaboration has had on their teams.

5 Lessons Learned Through Failure

Exygy Labs was intended to be an experiment within itself. As we wrap up the year and reflect on the results, we’ve celebrated many failures:

It took us over three months to execute our first project, which is far longer than communities in need can wait. We focused too much of our work on the technology solutions, and not enough on evolving cultures. When resources are scarce and time is of the essence, we learned how critical it is to distinguish between decisions that needed to be made swiftly and decisions that benefit more from a thorough assessment. Our team did not dedicate time to work on Exygy Labs the same way we prioritize paid client work, which resulted in multiple project disruptions. We were reminded that our communities have so much to teach us and we always need to be prepared to listen first, act second.

Perhaps the biggest lesson we’ve learned is how to embrace failure and share them more proudly within the team and publicly. The more we can do this, the more comfortable we will be in taking risks.

Where Do We Go From Here?

With many parts of our lives changing this year, we’ve learned that the biggest risk is not taking any risks. Our team has learned to appreciate the value of experimenting, and that this must be at the core of what we do if we desire to grow and make an even greater impact.

For that reason, we’ve decided to continue Exygy Labs, though not in the current form. We will embed our experimental and bold approaches inspired by Exygy Labs throughout our client work, internal operations, marketing, and more. We want every part of our business to reflect a willingness to take risks in an effort to be better. How will this all tactically play out? That’ll be an experiment in itself.

Stay safe and see you in 2021!