Tag Archives: Learning

Please Wear Your Clown Hat When You Celebrate Failure

A recent column in Wired magazine recounted the story of the 5,127 prototypes used to create the first Dyson vacuum cleaner. In this column, Sir James Dyson notes his similarity to Thomas Edison, who said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Dyson appears to take pride in his 5,127 prototypes as emblematic of the persistence and fortitude of an entrepreneur. In contrast, I think this extraordinary number of unsuccessful trials may illustrate a very fundamental misconception about innovation. Continue reading

Boiled Frogs and Thought Experiments

Aristotle understood the value of thought experiments. They can be done quickly without get your hands dirty. Measurements are always precise and consistent. Results are perfectly repeatable. So, why bother with a real experiment when you can do a thought experiment?

Silly Aristotle. We are much smarter than that now. Perhaps. Management thinkers constantly quote the example of the boiled frog. Put a frog in boiling water and it will jump out. Slowly raise the temperature of the water and it will fail to notice the gradual change and boil to death. Since most of us lack both the frog and the insensitivity needed to do this experiment, like Aristotle, we accept the results of the mental experiment.

What would a real experiment reveal? The frog dies if placed in boiling water. The frog jumps out when the water is heated slowly. What happens if the frog is placed in freezing water? It will die. What happens if the temperature of the water drops slowly, such as from summer to winter? The frog will activate genes that produce metabolic enzymes that function at low temperatures.

As any dinosaur could tell you, slow change gives us time to react, rapid change can lead to extinction.

References:

Fast Company: “Next Time, What Say We Boil a Consultant.” November 1995 (p. 20)

www.snopes.com: The “boiled frog” story.

Bad Outcomes vs. Bad Decisions

Only a fool assumes that bad outcomes are always a sign of bad decisions. If you play Russian Roulette with 5 of 6 chambers full, and don’t blow your head off, you still made a bad choice.

When we get a bad outcome based on a good choice, we often incorrectly “learn” that we made a bad choice. It is even worse when we get good outcomes from bad choices — we “learn” that we made a good choice. Real learning requires that we clearly distinguish the decision from its outcome, and such learning is critical in a stochastic world.