Scientist Freeman Dyson: trial and error created the bicycle

In a 1998 interview in Wired Magazine, Stewart Brand asked the famed physicist his thoughts on failure:

You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works - it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential. The same is true of airplanes.

(Hat tip to Jeff Stibel on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network)

A few companies are suing ex-employees for using "negative know-how" in a new job

This is from the book I'm currently reading, Orly Lobel's Talent Wants to Be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding:

Thomas Edison once protested, "I haven't failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that do not work." In the world of trade secrets, a remarkable example of the controversial expansion of the types of information and knowledge that can be deemed secret in the battles of our talent wars is negative know-how [JC emphasis]--the knowledge of what not to do. An example of negative know-how is when an ex-employee will not undertake a series of failed ways to get to a certain chemical result, but tests other unknown ways until she strikes success [as we've pointed out before, trial and error is not random]. Claiming theft of negative know-how is described as one of the strangest developments in trade secret law. When courts protect negative know-how as the property of an ex-employer the consequence for inventors who move to a new firm can be liability for not repeating past mistakes and failures. 

Certainly, if companies are claiming ownership of their former employees' knowledge of what not to do, learning from mistakes must really be important. Right?

"Better Place" bankruptcy as a component of broader trial-and-error process?

There has been much written on the recent bankruptcy filing of A Better Place, a company proposing to drive adoption of all-electric cars by creating a battery-swapping infrastructure - extending the range of electric cars without a lengthy wait to recharge.

Is Better Place's demise the end of the story? Saul Kaplan doesn't think so. In his post at Fortune Magazine's site, Kaplan discusses what the company's failure means, and answers the company's many after-the-fact critics:

The "I told you so crowd" immediately started taking shots. New York Times columnist David Brooks took a swing directly at Agassi calling him a "brilliant technology entrepreneur" but implying that he was among "conference circuit capitalists who give fantastic presentations but have turned out to be marginal in history." Ouch. Easy for David Brooks to criticize others for sharing their point of view at conferences when he leverages a New York Times platform to do the same thing.

He points to Tesla's announcement of battery-swapping trials as evidence that the model is far from dead:

Tesla is going to test stations where Model-S owners can swap batteries in 90 seconds for $50-60, less time and money than filling up a tank of gas. Bold business models don't die; they just get reinvented. If we want to go from best practice to next practice we have to try more stuff. We learn more from efforts that don't work than from those that do. So instead of piling on those that try to do bold things without initial success or criticizing those that share their paradigm shifting ideas publicly, we should thank them for pushing us forward and providing the knowledge to try again, only better the next time.

As we've discussed here, trial and error is not a random process; within a constrained problem definition, failures reduce the subsequent exploration that's needed to solve the problem. A Better Place didn't work, but that's not the end of the story. Battery-swapping may very well work, in time.

Trial and error is not random; rather, it requires intelligence and planning

I find this Thomas Edison quote fascinating:

Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.

What feels strange about these words is the equating the value of negative results (failures) to positive results (successes). Why would they be equally valuable? Couldn't you spend your whole life producing negative results? How depressing!

Not if you're like Edison. Because what's not stated in the quote is that, to pull this off, Edison had to work in a certain frame that bounded his search for an answer. Within a bounded frame, each negative result is valuable, because it indicates an area of the frame that is not what you're looking for, making it more likely that the next test, within that boundary, is successful. And so on.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb crystallized this in his book "Antifragile," when he described how to approach trial and error "rationally."

Trial and error has one overriding value people fail to understand: it is not really random, rather, thanks to optionality, it requires some rationality. One needs to be intelligent in recognizing the favorable outcome and knowing what to discard.

And one needs to be rational in not making trial and error completely random. If you are looking for your misplaced wallet in your living room, in a trial and error mode, you exercise rationality by not looking in the same place twice. In many pursuits, every trial, every failure provides additional information, each more valuable than the previous one - if you know what does not work, or where the wallet is not located. With every trial one gets closer to something, assuming an environment in which one knows exactly what one is looking for. We can, from the trial that fails to deliver, figure out progressively where to go.

I can illustrate it best with the modus operandi of Greg Stemm, who specializes in pulling long-lost shipwrecks from the bottom of the sea.... He does an extensive analysis of the general area where the ship could be. That data is synthesized into a map drawn with squares of probability. A search area is then designed, taking into account that they must have certainty that the shipwreck is not in a specific area before moving on to a lower probability area. It looks random but is not. It is the equivalent of looking for a treasure in your house: every search has an incrementally a higher probability of yielding a result, but only if you can be certain that the area you have searched does not hold the treasure.

Stemm first maps the area where the shipwreck could have been, in the same way you focus on the living room to look for your lost wallet. That's the frame of the problem, and it takes intelligence and thought to figure out the appropriate frame (Edison would agree). Within the frame, trial and error becomes a powerful tool, in which each failure incrementally reduces the size of the frame, and gets you closer to your ultimate success.

Are "negative results just what you want"? If you have defined a proper frame for your search, the answer is yes.

[While I have been digesting "Antifragile," Albert Wenger has posted a fantastic and very thoughtful synopsis of the book and its ideas. Highly recommended.]

From "Reverse Innovation": PepsiCo India's experience of trial and error

The new book "Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere" by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, describes the phenomenon of new products being born in emerging markets, with radically different value propositions and price points, and spreading to developed markets. This approach is the reverse of the traditional model for Western companies, which create (expensive) products at home, and then adapt them to developing markets.

This excerpt describes some of PepsiCo India's experience developing a new snack cracker named Aliva. It beautifully highlights the inevitability of mistakes when you are trying something new, and that persistently pushing through and learning from those mistakes are hallmarks of a successful product launch.

From its inception to its 2009 launch, the Aliva project took nearly four years. Aliva was evaluated against criteria that took full account of potential uncertainties. Such latitude was indispensable. Aliva had to make its way through a predictably fraught gestation. There were plenty of bumps in the road, and plenty to learn on the way.

Aliva's most vexing challenge was its packaging. Packages are hugely important to snack food performance. If snacks had remained in the era of the general-store cracker barrel, great branding opportunities would never have materialized. Aliva's packaging needed to be as distinctive as the shape of the cracker. The packaging had to communicate that Aliva was both healthy and fun. Decisions about the package would have implications for Aliva's texture and shape, the way the cracker was produced (through baking), and the attractiveness of the offering at the point of sale.

The Aliva bag featured a number of innovations. [Program manager Vidur] Vyas claims that nothing like it had ever been tried before. It was to be made from new materials on brand-new - and untested - machinery. The bag was designed to be flat on the bottom. Unlike typical snack bags in the United States, it could stand up straight on a retail shelf, tabletop, or counter. The packaging material was therefore heavier and stiffer than conventional plastic film. It turned out that a more rugged package could actually be made using only two laminate layers, not three. This solution was both more cost-effective and environmentally friendly.

The package specifications needed to address certain constraints of local infrastructure. It often took a long time to distribute perishable goods through a vast, predominantly rural retail network. Crackers can spoil more quickly than other types of snacks. Aliva therefore had to be protected from spoilage as well as breakage. A rugged, lightproof, hermetic package was key.

Vyas and his team endured a perfect storm of complications on the way to satisfying these needs. Because the Aliva bag was a first-of-its-kind package design, it seemed that every element of the package's structure and manufacture either had to be invented or endlessly troubleshot. To start with, the new packaging machinery was touchy. In limited test runs, things seemed fine. But once Aliva launched, in May 2009, problems cropped up during production-scale runs, particularly with the heat seal at the top of the bag. So, new material had to be designed. This required help from squadrons of global experts on polymers and lamination technologies.

There were nettlesome challenges on other fronts as well. Because Aliva would rely on a new baking system, which had only recently been used for the first time to produce cookies in PepsiCo's Mexico region, Vyas's team needed time and technical guidance to learn how to operate it reliably.

Finally, the team aspired to create a cracker in an eccentric triangular shape. The cracker's unique design was considered an important aspect of the values the brand would communicate. The triangle shape was meant to connote speed, stimulation, and taste. The triangle's curved edges were meant to connote health. At first, however, the crackers suffered unacceptable levels of breakage. Coming up with a workable version - a cracker with a low rate of breakage and a pleasing combination of textures - required innumerable trials.

But if Aliva's journey to market had an unusual share of difficulties, that is only because it was forging entirely new paths in a number of areas. To its credit, PepsiCo patiently tolerated a high degree of necessary experimentation... with packaging, with the baking system, and with the architecture of the cracker itself. (pp 167-168)

From "Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere," by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble. Published by Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted by permission.

Economist Tim Harford challenges us to be vulnerable and "make good mistakes"

In this TED talk, Harford talks about complex systems and that their common characteristic: they progress through trial and error. One example is the US economic system. Harford's observation: "10% of US businesses disappear every year." Therefore, the system is being renewed, constantly, by new businesses springing up, others adjusting and advancing and some going away.

In other words, having something turn out differently from your expectations may be a failure or mistake but not a disaster. It likely is a piece of information that you can use in your next attempt.

Echoes here of Edison, possibly the greatest trial-and-errorist in the modern age ("a negative result is as useful to me as a positive result").

Harford encourages us to be open and patient with trying and failing. He has great observations on things like educators' insisting there are "correct" answers to every question posed and politicians' confidence that their plan will "fix" an economy.

Another quote: "Is is much easier to lay down the law.... Uncertainty, fallibility, being challenged may hurt.... 'It is very difficult to make good mistakes.'"

Watch it:

HBR article on lessons from gamers lauds failure as "an antecedent to success"

The May 2008 Harvard Business Review features an article called "Leadership's Online Labs," in which the authors discuss the results of a study of high-performing users of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), like World of Warcraft. In these games, participants worldwide take on roles and participate in quests and adventures. These games require the players to act in concert to achieve their objectives, planning together and using their varied capabilities to, for example, storm and take control of a castle against determined adversaries.

The article focuses on how the lessons learned by the MMORPG standouts could be applied to business. One passage in the article was very relevant to this site:

Trial and error play a big role in accomplishing game tasks. Failure, instead of being viewed as a career killer, is accepted as a frequent and necessary antecedent to success.

In one incident that we recorded from EverQuest, seven guild members prepared for a brand-new quest that required them to get their team across a large lake protected by a gruesome and hostile creature. Although they had formulated a strategy based on information gathered in advance, everyone seemed comfortable with the high likelihood of failure, at least initially. After a first attempt, in which the whole team nearly drowned and was forced to retreat, members quickly began plotting a new strategy in the spirit of a fundamental gamer maxim (one not heard very often in business): Let's try that again.

Frequent risk taking allows players to practice the art of weighing odds calmly in uncertain environments. Confronting risk routinely and with a level head will be an important leadership skill as the real-world business environment becomes more uncertain and as success comes to depend more on innovation than on execution. Organizations can help prepare leaders by fostering a culture in which failure is tolerated. They can expose leaders to risk by mimicking the structure of games, breaking down big challenges into small projects. Failure, after all, is clearly more palatable for the individual and more affordable for the organization when it happens at the project level rather than on a larger scale.