Tag Archives: Jonah Lehrer

Failure vs. Flailure

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I’ve come across several interesting pieces that involve the concept of failure. Failure is praised as being the key to success. It is glamorized and made an essential ingredient in would-be innovative corporate cultures. When you scratch beneath the surface though, failure is often superficially represented. Failing well takes process and effort.

10,000 Hours
Malcolm Gladwell builds a strong case in Outliers that one of the things outstanding individuals in their field have in common is a lot of practice. Specifically, they accrue 10,000 hours early on in life. His point is that standout successes are less about talent than time-in (and the circumstances that allow for that level of commitment). That 10,000 hours is tied directly to failure because in those 10,000 hours there is a lot of failing going on. To make use of failure then, takes a lot of effort. If you work at something hard for 6 hours a day you get just over 2000 hours in in a year. That’s five years of extremely focused work time just to reach that minimum 10,000 hours. Given our fragmented days none of us gets in 6 focused hours. Are we setting enough time aside to accumulate enough failure to succeed?

The neuroscience of ‘gut’intuition.
Jonah Lehrer’s book How We Decide tackles failure from another angle, decision making. He spends a good deal of time demonstrating how experts in their fields – and these are often life or death fields like firefighting and aviation – have trained and practiced so much that they’re able to sense – often without consciously knowing why – what the right decision is. This gut instinct often saves their lives. It also is directly connected to Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. That intense training time – and the inevitable mistakes made during it – is necessary to develop a useful gut instinct.

The Path of Mastery
George Leonard’s book Mastery tackles failure from yet a third perspective, that of the plateau. Rather than getting something wrong, many people in developing their skills hit periods where they simply don’t get any better. This plateau is familiar to anyone who practices sports, music, arts, etc. Those plateaus are part of the 10,000 hours commitment to an endeavor. Sticking to something even when you’re not getting noticeably better at it takes a degree of resolve. These plateaus are also periods of learning but this knowledge is accrued more subtly and often through repetition. This is akin to riding a bicycle. You may not get faster, or more successful with stunts, but every slippery road you navigate or rock you hop adds to that intuitive ability to ‘feel’your way through. It may feel like more of the same on the surface, but underneath deeper learning is happening.

For all three authors success is a product of a commitment of energy, focus and time. It can’t be rushed. But it also can’t be squandered.

Taking Scientific Method out of the laboratory
“Work smarter not harder” is a popular cliche for the benefits of efficiency. I might recast it in terms of learning from failure. While it is popular to have a corporate culture that rewards people willing to fail, without a process to fail well, resources, money and energy can be squandered. Compounding this is the reality of the modern world. Businesses thrive on ‘first-mover advantage’and ‘speed to market’. This creates an environment of pressure to rush things forward.  In doing so, sometimes we mistakenly embrace flailure instead of failure.

Flailure (which is my own word) is experimentation without process. It is a shotgun approach to solving problems. Try this, try that, oh, and try that too. Flailure often happens with the same energy and commitment but with no useful results. Any time a project succeeds or fails and no one knows exactly why, that is a flailure and its a tremendous waste.

We were all taught scientific method in high school. Yet for some reason it rarely finds its way outside laboratories. To make the most of those 10,000 hours of practice time we need to use scientific process. Any project – marketing, financial, operational – can be thought of as an experiment. Doing so means determining what the objective is, developing a hypothesis on how do to it, designing an experiment to test the hypothesis, controlling for interference which might obstruct evaluation of the tested factors and then recording the data properly to conclude what the smartest next step forward will be. This doesn’t require a lab coat or PhD, just a little foresight and thought upfront, before resources are spent.

There is an army adage popularized by General Omar Bradley “Amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics.” The smartest strategy in the world is only a useful as its execution. If failure is an inevitable part of the strategy for success, shouldn’t we be focused on setting ourselves up to fail usefully? The alternative is crossing our fingers hoping something will work and if it doesn’t having to start at the beginning all over again.

Bringing the scientific process to our vocation begins with paying careful attention to the ‘devil in the details’. The big idea is an adrenaline rush for sure, but its ultimate usefulness – whether that idea succeeds or fails – lies a reasoned approach to the small steps taken toward realizing that idea.

Be A Student of Errors

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Last night I was finishing How We Decide which is  the most useful book I’ve read in a while. Toward the end, the author was offering summary ideas on how to leverage the insights of the book. He dropped a single phrase, “Be a student of errors” which stuck with me.

In my experience with Aikido and as a martial arts instructor, the concept of being a student of errors is a familiar one. It is summarized among Aikido practitioners through the Zen concept of ‘beginner’s mind’. The idea being to always perceive one’s self as a student, never a master.

In How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer points out the fallacy of certainty. He argues that when someone is certain of their perspectives they block out disconfirming evidence which often leads to foolish decisions. (A look across Wall St. and the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe seems compelling substantiation of this point.)

Instead, Lehrer recommends people seek out contrarian input so as to listen to and participate in the argument that goes on in our heads. The brain, it seems, is wired for internal conflict. This is a part of how it comes to right decisions. To short-cut this process can be counter productive. This is at odds with a culture that demands rapid decision making and headline-worthy declarative statements.

Aikido as a martial system has a finite number of named techniques and applications. These are practiced again and again in different scenarios. (i.e. the same defensive technique is applied to varying types of attacks.) Only through constant repetition can a student internalize the form so that when a sudden situation arises they can be confident that the right response will be automatic.

I often admonish students who verbally explain to me what they should do. “So I should pull the arm forward and then…”

“Don’t tell me, show me. Aikido is learned with your body. There’s nothing to say.”

You can imagine how well this goes over.

Learning Aikido takes time which frustrates many people. There is no short cut. You can’t rush it. You have to take the long road and make many mistakes. You have to be willing to look foolish in front of peers as you fall clumsily or accidentally fumble a training sword dropping it with loud clatter.

In learning Aikido you must allow for enough time to make these mistakes to re-wire the brain to allow the body to react perfectly in the spur of the moment.

This is of course no great martial arts secret. Professional athletes go through the same process. So do designers, engineers and managers. It is in short experience that we pay for in senior executives. Experience commands higher salaries because experience (in theory anyhow) allows for efficiencies in right decision making.

Think about this the next time you pay a high premium hiring a whiz kid. They may be very bright and accomplished in discreet areas of their craft, but have they had the field experience to apply that knowledge under business duress? Battle tested matters as much as book smarts and likely more because the books are being rewritten continuously.

I have mentioned before my quarrel with self-proclaimed experts in fields so new there hasn’t been the time to develop expertise (i.e. social media). I don’t argue that some better-oriented people might be able to guide lesser-oriented people in becoming familiar with these new technologies. However, to assume someone with a few years tinkering in new technologies is an expert on the impact and execution of those technologies is naive. We should all be wary of masters of any universe.

As the Zen folks say, “A (self proclaimed) master has filled their cup so full of their own knowledge there is no room to learn any more.”

Lehrer finishes his book with a quote from Colin Powell, “First tell me what you know. Then tell me what you don’t know. Only then can you tell me what you think.”

Sound advice.

Mistakes, Change, Trial & Error

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I have been reading a great book on the neuroscience behind decision making. I was reading that the brain likes to be right. It wants to predict outcomes. Dopamine secretion happens when events work according to the brain’s expectation (i.e. dopamine is a reward). The secretions stop or change when things don’t work as planned. This abrupt reduction in dopamine is experienced as a jarring change by the body. Here, the brain modifies its expectations to try and be right the next time (and to keep the dopamine flowing).

So it seems that the brain’s use of dopamine is tied to learning via trial and error. Mistakes, to the brain, are useful (and necessary) learning tools provided we choose to learn from them. In fact, this type of learning often gives rise to the ‘instinctual’reactions well-experience professionals make in athletics, combat, or emergencies.

In thinking about this idea of learning from mistakes, I couldn’t help being reminded of the ‘Now Not New‘ concept I organize many of my own business perspectives on.

In business terms, ‘Now Not New’is a revenue-centric outlook that leverages the trials and errors of those focusing on ‘new’to provide real solutions ‘now’. By my way of thinking, pioneers take big risks, probe the unknown, and most often fail. For some people the high-risk excitment of being on the bleeding edge is a great motivator.  Certainly our culture’s willingness to reward those people with hype and praise adds to the appeal.

For businesses, these pioneers provide great learning that can be refined and redirected with a higher probability of tangible success (see my earlier bit on inventions). In this sense, businesses focused on ‘Now Not New’may not get the first wave of buzz that pioneers attract, but they tend to make the money and build new business categories. Hulu is doing it now against YouTube. YouTube you’ll recall got a lot of hype and market valuation but still isn’t making anyone much money. Conversely, because it is making money Hulu is getting plenty of hype. Which, as an executive would you prefer?

Related, it seems that neurologically speaking unpredictable outcomes – either from mistakes or change beyond our control – are jarring. It’s no surprise then that human beings tend to dislike making mistakes or coping with change despite lip service otherwise.

Companies, by extension, also seem to prefer homeostasis. Yes, there are plenty of people and books and seminars preaching the embrace of change and the positive benefit of mistake making. But between the lines, what they’re selling is a means of ‘expecting the unexpected’which is in fact fighting the jarring feeling of mistakes and change and attempting to make it predictable.

Switching gears for a moment, in stories about wilderness survival, most tragedies stem from the endangered person’s refusal to acknowledge the change in their circumstances or to learn from a mistake once they’ve made it. They can’t let go of what was supposed to happen and won’t accept what is now happening. In this state of denial they become disoriented to the reality around them, make poor choices, and often pay the ultimate price.

Transferring this knowledge from the wilderness frontier to the business frontier: On the topic of expertise, it might make sense to be wary of anyone claiming to be an expert in an industry that hasn’t been around long. Expertise comes with experience which is an accumulation of a lot of trial and error. In businesses (and I’m thinking social media) that haven’t been around very long, it’s simply impossible to have made enough mistakes to be considered an expert at this nacent stage.

Second, we should admit when we’re lost, confused or uncomfortable. Denial in business leads to paying its own ultimate price. Once we acknowledge being lost, we can start looking for a way out.

Third, we should build mechanisms into our organizations that allow us to learn from mistakes.

Lastly, acknowledge and behave according to the fact that nothing is consistently predictable. This means setting up operational mechanisms to observe and asses at regular intervals. It also means thinking hard about how to adapt to change knowing that everyone in the company will be uncomfortable with it.

In mistakes, change and trial and error lie opportunities for business poised to see and solve for the problems of now which in turn will lead to growth and revenue (the dopamine of industry).