This book is listed on the 2012 Chief of Staff of the US Air Force Professional Reading Program
The book focuses on how Peter Palchinsky in Russia/USSR exemplified and codified 3 principals to successful projects and initiatives:
- First: seek out new ideas and try new things
- Second: when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable
- Third: seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along
The first idea is that true innovation and transformation need to be predicated by early and often experimentation. This idea for trying new things is obvious, only doing what has been done before gets the same results. In order to truly adapt, overcome challenges, changes are necessary. However, the key is to make changes at scales where failure is survivable.
This notion of survivable failure comes to a head when addressing centralized planned projects. He notes several problems with centralized planning, an overestimated the value of centralized knowledge. From that, he addresses how a central bureau’s information is unlikely to address the specifics on the ground, and when integrated over many parts, can tend to destabilize the whole project. He uses a quote that is more direct: "Your first try will be wrong. Budget and design for it," Aza Raskin, designer of Firefox.
Some corroborating evidence was used in citing a study between highly speculative research grants by Howard Huges Medical Institute (HHMI) and the centrally directed NIH MERIT scholarships, which were judged more conservatively in the scope of the whole NIH research portfolio. IN this study, projects selected by HHMI are more likely to be breakthrough and more likely to fail - but ultimately much more skewed to the upside in terms of importance and value to society.
Now, he is also an advocate of measuring the Ultimately, this is the third Palchinsky principal, because getting the feedback, knowing if you are doing any good, is how you will be able to learn from mistakes – and likely even know if you made a mistake at all. Key in the measurement is the controlled experiment nature of how the measurements were taken.
However, not all experiments can be controlled: there do exist "Fundamentally Unidentified Questions" (FUQ'd questions- neat acronym) - questions for when we can measure, calculate and extrapolate from our existing knowledge, but cannot conduct controlled experiments (such as does carbon dioxide cause global warming) - to defeat people claiming that questions are FUQ'd, scientists and innovators must have an identification strategy for what they are going to measure and control.
In his final chapter, Mr. Hartford sums up his application of Palchinsky’s principals thusly, "the ability to adapt requires this sense of security, an inner confidence that the cost of failure is a cost we will be able to bear. Sometimes that takes real courage; at other times, all that is needed is the happy self-delusion of a lost three-year-old. Whatever the source, we need that willingness to risk failure. Without it, we will never truly succeed."
While some management theories indicate that stress is good for innovation, the key here is to create survivable stress – eustress – by which innovation is driven, but avoids overly conservative behavior that generally inhibits the bigger innovations and adaptations.
Overall, I recommend this book for the ideas and perspective on how to innovate in systemic contexts. Large, sweeping initiatives will likely not succeed, but targeted and frequent innovations will explore the space of possibilities more quickly and are more likely to take hold. A good message for upcoming systemic leaders. Read More......
