Success Starts With Failure

Given that many humans have a preference to learn by doing, it is inevitable that in order to learn to do something successfully we will have to coach ourselves through many failures. Why we collectively find it so hard to apply this to public life, business and organisational development beats me given that this is clearly a big part of the human scene, I don't know.

So it is no surprise that the history shows (and see here for more info Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford – review | Books | The Observer) that "Disruptive innovations bubble up in the marketplace by a process of trial and error. The more players there are, the higher the likelihood of something brilliant appearing. But, by extension, a reliable measure of how efficient a system is at generating success is the volume of failures it can safely expose".
I like that phrase 'safely expose': we need to be able to allow it to be okay to fail, to recognise that it is part of learning to succeed. That is one advantage of the old British thing about 'not the winning ...' and that it is important to try, and to celebrate good effort as well as success. I think that we would do well not to lose it in the light of this argument: perhaps it had more to do with the innovative drive in the 1800's that characterised Britain than we have given credit for. Of course this also links to my tag-thread on failure which I find I keep adding to.

One of the things I found myself also agreeing heartily with was this:
"an ego blow to swaggering executives who think their tremendous commercial acumen is what has saved them from ruin and earned them their fat bonuses. Luck and timing are just as important, if not more so."
Quite so; I would like this to be more widely recognised and is part of the argument for reining in the hubristic bonus culture which has helped to bring our economies to their knees recently.

Anyway, moving off my soap-box; the article introduces

a check-list of conditions that must be in place for good ideas to chase out bad ones. Big institutions, whether corporations or governments, should create safe havens where experts can try new techniques and fail without bringing the whole system crashing down. Prizes for achieving specific goals work better than grants for open-ended research, since the latter are prone to be captured by lazy establishments fiddling around the margins of orthodox thinking. Regulations dictated from on high by controlling managers are less effective at preventing disasters than corporate cultures that invite dissent from the lower ranks and heed whistle-blowers.

I'm putting the book on my get-list and have got the Kindle sample.