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Brain researchers are excited because they may have found the key to preventing humans from making mistakes. In new research, they discovered that when humans are involved in tasks that require attention, their brain activity increases just prior to their making a mistake. They’re hoping that this will eventually enable people to avoid making mistakes.
I’m thinking: This might be wonderful if you’re an air traffic controller, but if you’re an innovator, this is the opposite of what you want. Innovators need to fail, often and regularly, to maintain innovation discipline. As Edison proved long ago in his hundreds of failed experiments before he perfected the light bulb, innovation success usually comes after mistakes and failures.
Many innovators follow the project management model that tries to minimize failures. I'm convinced that’s because they’re afraid to be humiliated by failure. It's well known in the psychology of self discipline that one of the prime reasons why people can't accomplish things is because they’re afraid of being humiliated through failure. They would rather avoid doing a task, even if they know it’s important, because they're afraid failure will make them look foolish.
But successful innovators know an essential truth about innovation: Everybody fails, and failure in itself is not bad. It's how you react to failure that matters. If you think that failure will make you look foolish, you'll try to avoid it by whipping your innovation systems into shape so that they don't produce failures or mistakes. If you recognize that failure is merely a step in the process, part of learning and experimentation, then you’ll embrace it. So get out there and screw up. Your innovation efforts will be the better for it. |
