It seems that I'm not the only guy diligently tracking examples of where challenge drives improvement. I recently discovered a new book by Henry Petroski, a professor of history at my alma mater, Duke University. Petroski's book is called Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design. The thesis of the book is that engineers and designers often only learn how to improve by watching the very visible failure of others.
A few interesting examples from Petroski make his point clear (from a recent Q&A in Duke Magazine):
- "Frank Gehry, the architect, designed the Disney concert hall in Los Angeles. Aesthetically, it's a great success. But one corner of the [polished stainless-steel] building reflected sunlight into a condominium complex across the street that was blinding and also heated up the condominiums by fifteen degrees. That would be an example of something generally working, but there's this unintended consequence. You could say that in the ideal world, that would have been anticipated. And in the future, it's another thing that designers will note what not to do."
- You go to the drugstore and you get a prescription filled, and it's in this container with a cap you have to push down and twist [to open]. These things became required when a lot of children were dying of overdoses of medicine that they weren't supposed to be having access to. The idea was, let's make child-resistant packaging—simple as that. But sometimes you can make something almost too good, and it turned out that a lot of older people and arthritic people couldn't open these packages, so they would ask somebody to open them for them, and if they did get them open, they'd leave them open. So these older people would leave open medicine bottles all around, and their grandchildren would come and visit them—same thing was happening."
I think Petroski's insight is one that we find throughout the history of human society. We tell stories and revisit history as a way to remember and attempt to repeat the mistakes of the past. This includes the failure of leaders and organizations - from Hitler to Enron. But it happens everyday as fathers and mothers try to pass lessons to their children.
At my office, we recently began publishing weekly stories of actual mistakes and successes that we have experienced recently. And last year I wrote of how I have often improved most by learning from mistakes in new product marketing and new business pitches.
To err is human, as is to learn from our mistakes. And yet again, challenge leads to improvement.
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