98. The cost of failure has changed
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
In an industrial setting, failure can be fatal—to the worker or to the bottom line.
If we’re building a giant factory, the building can’t fall down. If we’re hauling 10,000 pounds of ore, we need to move it the right way the first time. If we’re changing the legal conditions on a thousand life insurance policies, we can’t afford the class action lawsuit if we do it wrong.
Noted.
But if we’re trading hypotheses on a new scientific breakthrough, of course we have to be wrong before we can be right. If we’re inventing a new business model or writing a new piece of music or experimenting with new ways to increase the yield of an email campaign, of course we have to be willing to be wrong.
If failure is not an option, then neither is success.
The only source of innovation is the artist willing to be usefully wrong. A great use of the connection economy is to put together circles of people who challenge each other to be wronger and wronger still—until we find right.
That’s at the heart of the gas station question: discovering if the person you’re interviewing is comfortable being wrong, comfortably verbalizing a theory and then testing it, right there and then. Instead of certainty and proof and a guarantee, our future is about doubt and fuzzy logic and testing.
We can (and must) teach these skills, starting with kids who are happy to build towers out of blocks (and watch them fall down) and continuing with the students who would never even consider buying a term paper to avoid an essay in college.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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