How can we innovate without making (costly) mistakes? Basically, we can't. So, should we tolerate mistakes, or encourage them? Merely tolerating mistakes is not sufficient to encourage innovation and intellectual chance taking. The challenge for both individuals and businesses is to foster environments in which experimentation is encouraged and there are no (or few) inhibitions to trying out new untested ideas. If taken to its logical extreme, though, this philosophy might result in continuously failing businesses. One happy mistake after another.
So, somehow, we must communicate that there are no penalties for offering new solutions and there are rewards for offering up creative solutions while at the same time building our culture, which values intellectual honesty, integrity and rigor. This culture will enable us to test our hypotheses against our starting assumptions and objectives, and then efficiently discard those hypothesis (the majority) that don't pass the test. We call this Efficient Failure.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Encouraging Mistakes
