I've been reading the postings on this thread and wanted to make an
observation. It seems to me that a healthy corporate culture would not
want to avoid confronting and even celebrating failures and mistakes as
the learning experiences that they are. Anytime a culture makes it
uncomfortable for a person or group to fail when trying something new, it
will cause these people to avoid risk and experimenting. In the healthy
cultures, you will find people telling stories not only of their great
successes but of their failures as well. But when speaking of failures,
it will not be in a negative but in a positive sense. And they will
likely also tell what they learned from the experience. In fact, by
definition the idea of experimenting suggests that not all will work out
as hoped (maybe none will come out as hoped--some will be better, some
worse, and some may not make much of a ripple one way or another). I read
one story where this idea of experimenting, failing, and learning was
called "failing forward." I think we should encourage that kind of
failure. And, as I've said before, it's useful to appreciate that failure
is always a value judgment rendered after the fact.
I don't know what the management of L.L. Bean is like, but my superficial
impression has been that it wants people to experiment and that it
understands that not all experiments will succeed like they want them to.
Is that right, Rol?
John Woods
jwoods@execpc.com
>Replying to LO4303 --
>Actually, I/we believe that what we are doing is learning. Our
>large-scale design is to learn more about the business, apply what we
>learn, and learn more. The experiments are a part of a fabric. Is that
>what you mean when you say "each [experiment] is part of a larger
>sequential learning design."
>
>Part of keeping our experiments in view is for our own good. It is always
>difficult to acknowledge failure, and if we are not public about our
>experiments, the temptation to ignore it and pretend the failure never
>happened is just too overwhelming.
>
>We are in a web of motivations!
>
> Rol Fessenden
> LL Bean, Inc
> 76234.3636@compuserve.com
-- jwoods@execpc.com (John Woods)