Social media doesn't allow us to wait

  Neil records, cuts, interviews 
  Originally uploaded by Edublogger.

Or, at least, it's silly for any organisation to wait for launch date, press release time or some pre-defined notion of when we, the public, should be allowed to know anything.

Big bro blogs about how the Observer, his newspaper's sister Sunday edition, broke a story on the web on Thursday night. Rather than wait until Sunday morning to give this exclusive, with the risk that someone else would blog about it or catch the story first, the Sunday paper broke it 60 hours early.

This past week I've been talking and hearing about the importance of failure and how to capitalise on your own failures - more on that later - but most of the time failure comes down to just a couple of things.

One is not preparing the purpose of what you want to produce and creating something nobody wants. The second, paradoxically, is over-planning, not releasing anything or keeping communications to a minimum until you've 'got something to show' and, then, missing the boat.

The Observer shows how to avoid the latter, and The Guardian has been pretty damn good at managing the balance between thinking about doing stuff and just doing it (they're the best in the world at newspaper blogging and podcasting, bar none).

But it's still difficult for organisations (including the ones I work for) and individuals (above all me) to find the balance between these two crucial anti-failure ingredients. What else do you think is required in the anti-failure recipe?