Suzi Dafnis (of the Australian Businesswomen’s Network) alongside Cat Matson (Chief Digital Officer, City of Brisbane) share highlights from Day 5 at SXSW Interactive. Suzi was lucky enough to hear from keynote speaker Astro Teller who spoke about his work with Google X (which brought Google glass and is creating driverless cars currently), where the work he does is primarily experimental. Suzi gleaned great wisdom from Astro who explained that failure doesn’t have to mean not succeeding. In fact, the success of something is correlated to its failure rate, and so failing fast is important in order to ensure the success of a product, Astro explains. The importance of learning from failure was something that Astro talked about: with Google Glass, he said that their mistake was in marketing it like a finalised product to the public. Instead, they would have done better to prototype it, to get feedback. Astro advises to not be afraid of experimenting and letting people tell you what’s working or what’s not. Because a mistake free environment in which there is solid progress doesn’t actually exist. Next, Cat learned more about the art of reporting and the future of media. She gleaned that just because we’re all content creation machines and publish content, that doesn’t necessarily make our information news. In addition, Cat liked how the media was analogous to a fixed menu because only a few people could report the news. Nowadays, it’s more accurate to say the media is like a buffet because with the ubiquitousness of technological devices, everyone can report the news.
“Stop waiting for the perfect set of circumstances, just move, just try something, do something, take action, you can always retract or change it.”
