Sometimes Making a Series of Mistakes is Better Than Being Right

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Sometimes Making a Series of Mistakes is Better Than Being Right

By Tac Anderson ⋅ November 3, 2011 ⋅ Post a comment

Filed Under change, Failure, learning

There are, arguably, two kinds of change. Fast change usually driven from a point of crisis and long slow evolutionary change. Most of the attention gets focused on the first kind of change. It’s the most effective, because companies usually don’t have much choice. The second kind of change is really hard. It usually fails because resistance usually wins over the long road. Inertia is a powerful force. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I’ve learned a tactic that works, without anyone knowing that it works.

There’s a saying that goes something like, “You just can’t tell some people something they don’t already know.” People don’t want to hear something unless it’s already something they know/believe. We’re all guilty of it sometimes, but what if your job is to convince people of something they don’t know and very likely, don’t want to know? In a short term, crisis driven situation this is less of a problem because people have resigned themselves to change and if you do come up against this resistance, the reality of the inevitable usually wins out (if it’s going to win out). But this kind of resistance can be devastating when there is no crisis. Instead you have to take the approach of letting other people discover this truth on their own.

If failure is the best learning tool then you sometimes have to allow organizations to make a series of iterative mistakes in order to get them to where you want them to go. This may sound counter intuitive but let me explain. The reason you can’t tell someone something they don’t already know, is because they think they already have the answer to the problem, and it’s not your answer. In scientific terms, they have a hypothesis, so test it. If there hypothesis isn’t going to result in catastrophic failure and if their hypothesis at least moves them closer to the right answer and not further away from it, then put it to the test.

When the hypothesis is tested if you’re still not at the desired end goal, then help them form a new hypothesis and run it again. Hopefully with each resulting test you are able to take larger and larger steps in the right direction. And who knows, maybe their hypothesis will be right. It’s arrogant to think that we always have the right answer and everyone else is wrong.

“You just can’t tell some people something they don’t already know.”

Basically what you’re doing is you’re allowing other people to learn. You’re allowing them come to the same conclusions as you. We all have different skill sets. We all have areas of strength and areas of weakness. We’ll never improve on our weaknesses unless we’re given the opportunity to try and fail. This can be very frustrating for those of us that know the answer (or think we do). We may have already learned this lesson, but it doesn’t mean we can rob others of the opportunity to learn those lessons themselves. We’re doing them, ourselves or our organizations any favors.

The challenge comes in knowing when it’s not the right time to let people learn on their own. What if their hypothesis, is moving in the wrong direction? What if the need for drastic change is approaching faster than our iterative change is moving us? If this is the case then we have to exert more force. And hopefully by allowing people to come to the same conclusion you have you will have built some trust along the way.

Sometimes you have to make a series of iterative mistakes in order to get where you want to go.

I often explain this as moving the rolling boulder. As a Boy Scout growing up in Idaho, we regularly went camping in various camp sites all over the Rocky Mountains. One of our favorite activities was to climb to the top of the mountain and then roll boulders down from the top. Great fun.

Now imagine for a minute that your organization is one of those rolling boulders. A boulder is a very difficult thing to get rolling in the first place. They’re not perfectly round and there’s a lot of inertia to deal with. Once you get it moving you then have a lot of momentum, but the boulder isn’t perfectly round, so it’s never going to go straight. What do you do if the boulder gets off course? Do you stop it and try and restart it? Not if you can help it.

What you do is you start applying pressure to one side, so that it veers back on course. If your organization has momentum and is moving in the right direction you need to apply enough force to move it in the right direction but not so much that you risk stopping it. The only time you try and stop a boulder if it’s in serious risk of causing serious damage to people or property.

So unless your organization is in serious danger, I recommend you get used to always being a little off course. Keep applying pressure and keep moving it in the right direction but don’t get so frustrated that you apply too much pressure and risk slowing things down, because right now, if you’re moving in the basic direction, that’s better than not moving at all.

About Tac

Social media anthropologist. Communications strategist. Business model junkie. Chief blogger here at New Comm Biz.

Visit Tac Anderson's Website | Follow Tac Anderson on Twitter

http://jeffhora.wordpress.com Jeff Hora

Your post got me thinking of a couple of things.

First, the iterative description of long-term learning reminded me of a book I read entitled “Do It Wrong Quickly” by Mike Moran (http://www.amazon.com/Do-Wrong-Quickly-Marketing-ebook/dp/B001NOMIXY/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2). While not mirroring your description, Moran uses numerous examples, case studies, etc. to prove out the value of iterative failure and the learning that takes place as this goes on. I believe that the biggest blocker to adopting this more broadly is the very idea of failure, regardless of the size of the crash, gives us and our organizations the night sweats. Yet, this is how we learn and the very nature of continuous improvement (or at least kind of jerky, occasional improvement) implies mistakes made and lessons learned.

The other thing is when you said you are “allowing people to learn.” The comparison of of crisis-driven change and evolutionary change is interesting. Crises can initiate evolutionary change, but what came to mind for me was the visual of the educational journey many of us take. A truly crisis-driven education might look like a child not attending school or being encouraged to learn beyond experience until she gets within “striking distance” of maturity and/or entering the workforce. Then there would be this enormous 24/7/365 effort to learn everything you might need for maybe 12-18 months, hoping against hope that it will all come out OK. The more evolutionary model is the one most of us have experienced…..multiple years of attending classes and mentoring of some sort, going over information, gaining understanding the more we go over it, looking at it in different ways, asking questions, making mistakes and having them corrected (or, best of all, discovering the corrections yourself), etc. I don’t know about you, but as a survivor and graduate of the U.S. educational system, I took American History and English more than once in different grades…. .

Anyway, great post. Anything that makes me want to think and write more about something is a good thing….
http://www.newcommbiz.com/ tacanderson

I also think there’s a reluctance from companies because “on the job learning” is supposed to stop as you become more senior in the organization. You’re expected to know all the answers and admitting you don’t know is a sign of weakness that could lead to unemployment or at least being passed up for that next promotion.

Crisis driven change management in my view is even worse than cramming for the final, it’s basically being told the answer by senior leaders which removes any learning or practical application from the employees and I think can actually lead to a dependency from employees on leadership always telling them the answer. The result is that employees can become unable figure out how to change on their own.

This may sound like an extreme example but more and more I’m seeing leaders who continually manage by crisis. They almost create crisis situations because it’s easier for them to manage those than to allow employees to learn on their own.

And this is all compounded in public companies where they are driven by quarterly results. This is another area where start-ups have an advantage because of the nature of their business, they all know they don’t know what lies ahead and they have to learn. They can accept iterative mistakes and in fact expect them. This gets lost in mature businesses. Even non-public ones.

As always, thanks for the thought provoking comments.
http://jeffhora.wordpress.com Jeff Hora

“…being told the answer by senior leaders..” removes any chance at finding an at least BETTER solution. I know of a particular organization where it is widely known, but not advertised, that they are seeking a buy-out of a sizable chunk of their operational capability. The upper-mid level leaders are in the midst of Strategic Planning (so called…) and it is truly amazing how the planning seems to be leading toward a path where they “Partner closely” with another organization (the unacknowledged buyer) and alternative views of the future are shut down before their get air.
How successful could we be if we just failed more often?
http://OnTheSpiral.com/ GregoryJRader

This is one of your more quotable pieces Tac

I really like the boulder metaphor. Stopping it prematurely can be just as damaging as letting it run too long. That is probably the right metaphor for the recent Netflix debacle. Most people will agree that a deliberate change of direction was the right move for the long term, but doing it too soon, too suddenly, too overtly, etc was like expending an enormous amount of energy to stop the boulder dead in its tracks. Perhaps in that case the boulder was actually the customers who needed to be gently redirected towards streaming rather than strong-armed into a 90 degree turn.
http://www.newcommbiz.com/ tacanderson

That’s probably really accurate about Netflix. Their strategy was right, directionally, but they tried to move too quickly. They we’re too worried about the leading indicators and didn’t pay enough attention to where the bulk of their customers were at.
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