This is a guest post by David McGinnis. David is a self-proclaimed student of MBM since early 2007. He is always looking for new and better ways to understand and apply the principles of the free market in his job. His goal is to be unconsciously competent in this arena.

So I’m potty-training my 20 month old daughter. There are so many lessons, applications and struggles and wonderful parallels to everything I have ever and never been exposed to with regards to influencing the behavior of another. At minimum, there’s no missing the Human Action Model – toddlers do respond less predictably than adults, but that’s not what led me to post. I realized this experience has quite the lesson when you see it in the context of experimental discovery.

Let’s tie it to the line in our mental model “Discovery Process and Experimentation Versus Grand Plans” which states that “…a company without some ventures that fail is a company that isn’t taking enough risks.” Most everyone will agree that failures are necessary for success, but how necessary? Simply an unavoidable side effect? Something we put up with to get to the end goal? Perhaps, but I would like to posit that it is process-critical.

While training my daughter, I cannot anticipate every time that we’re “on the clock”, for if I did, she wouldn’t learn anything but to depend on me. I have to LET her fail, teach her why that happened, try to explain what she can do about it, and then simply wait for that fail/teach/learn cycle to repeat. Until it clicks.

You cannot learn certain things without first failing. What we’re calling “failure” here is a critical step in the process. If we celebrate those failures as a path to success, we will learn, grow and profit.

Here is an everyday illustration of learning from failure. Around the office, I am the go-to-guy for any IT issues that aren’t worth actually calling IT about (yet). Just yesterday there was a meeting going on and a projector that I am not at all familiar with wasn’t working, but I was pulled in to troubleshoot. One main style of troubleshooting is guess-and-check (a great math technique too!) so I grabbed the remote and started hitting buttons that made sense to me: input, hdmi, layout… things like that. While we ended up getting the display working, the attendees were impressed, but what I doubt they realize is that in that short amount of time there were a few buttons I pushed that didn’t do what I was hoping they would (self-view, presentation, some button with a picture on it) I quickly narrowed my options by learning those aren’t what I need. Now I’ll admit the stakes were very low for pushing a wrong button, but I think we want to find low stakes ways to risk failure.

Taking as a given that we want to be effective, efficient, and eliminate waste: How can we lower the social costs of making mistakes in order to create a learning culture?

Thanks to David for the guest post and frequent comments. If you’d like to submit a potential guest post, send a draft to ann.zerkle (at) cgkfoundation.org.

Experimental Discovery, failure, lessons from life, risks