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But consider the following questions. Do you fail in your judgments? Do you ever get access to the evidence that shows where you might be going wrong? Are your decisions ever challenged by objective data? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you are almost certainly not learning.
And if long-term outcomes were carefully tracked relative to valid historical data of similar cases,
direct feedback
If we are operating in an environment without meaningful feedback, we can’t improve. We must institutionalize access to the “error signal.”
How, then, to select between competing evolutionary systems? A good way is to run a trial.
A controlled trial of this kind, provided there is objective measurement, would establish the relative effectiveness of the drills, without the comparison being obscured by all other influences.
the power of failure is to do so while minimizing the costs.
pilot schemes. These provide an opportunity to learn on a small scale. But it is vital that pilots are designed to test assumptions rather than confirm them.
typically do whatever they can to make sure that the pilot is perfect right out of the starting gate.
later inhibit the success of the official launch.
Thus the pilot doesn’t produce knowledge about what won’t work.
Another “failure based” technique, which has come into vogue in recent years, is the so-called pre-mortem. With this method a team is invited to consider why a plan has gone wrong before it has even
been put into action. It is the ultimate “fail fast” technique.
the objectives have not been met; the plans have bombed. Team members are then asked to generate plausible reasons why.
“prospective hindsight,” as it is called, increases the ability of people to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30 percent.
Throughout the book we have looked at other techniques such as marginal gains and the lean start-up. But the point about all these methods is that they harness the incalculable potency of the evolutionary mechanism. Providing they are used with an eye to context, and are fused with a growth-orientated mindset, they set the stage for an endlessly powerful process: cumulative adaptation.
