Failure

I didn’t fail.  I just found 10,000 ways it wouldn’t work.  Thomas Edison.

While the famous Edison quote above is heavily edited from the original interview, the essential spirit of his words remains the same.  We talked about how success is born of action and iteration and failure.  We also talked about the relationships between competition, cooperation and losing and learning.

I just stumbled on a video which synthesizes those themes very well.  It was made by Honda.

In keeping with the idea that creativity and problem solving, like life, must remain heavily prejudiced in favor of action over theory, and reaching out over self-absorption, let us remember that the ‘think, plan, build’ model is only a broad one.  Better yet, let us plan to iteratively use that model any number of times on any project worth tackling.  And that forever after, those in care of the resulting product shall require the autonomy to tinker with it.

Feedback, including failure, is necessary to succeed.

Unstated Components

If you watch the video closely, there are at least two components of discovery and creativity and success that the video does not explicitly address, but very much implies. The first one is blatant; the team realizes that their members will try things that fail. They stand with each other, they work with each other, fully realizing that. The video itself is a testament by Honda that its team members will fail, and the rest of the team will stand by them as they do so.

Imagine for a moment looking into the eyes of your team mates, knowing they will fail. Imagine the respect and empathy you shall require. In the article on Characteristics of a Competitor, the emphasis is on the emotional stance of such a team member. Both the individual and the team is described in Maslow’s terms of actualization.

The second implication is more subtle but no less necessary. Honda’s ultimate success depends on all their team members continually striving and failing, reaching out and exploring their boundaries in their own areas of expertise in an effort to improve. Danica Patrick, the Indycar driver, gets closest to voicing it most directly when she says, “We bump up against that feeling [of being out of control] as much as we can, to try and push that limit further, and get comfortable there, and then push it again, and so you’re constantly on the brink of crashing, because that is the fastest.”

We are conditioned to consider Ms. Patrick’s remarks only in her context as the driver, the focal competitor in the race. But it is foundationally necessary for every member of the team to adopt this stance. The engineers, the pit crew, the back up drivers, every member of the team, approaches their contribution in this manner. They are all in their roles exploring the edges of their landscapes within the larger goal of the team.

This is the concept of complexity at work, of self-autonomous agents pushing their boundaries until they succeed. Think of the thousands of foraging ants, exploring and failing and exploring again, the whole colony a cascading effort of exploration, immediately adapting and reorienting around success via communication of its members.

References

Inventor of the Light bulb

Thomas Edison’s Concrete Houses