The value of failure

Recent highlighting of the value of failure includes a book by Mario Livio, Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe, and coincidentally the opening in Edinburgh of the world’s first Library of Mistakes.

In engineering, it’s usually possible to try things out, learn from failure and adapt quite quickly. In developing a successful light bulb, Thomas Edison did hundreds, even thousands, of iterations in developing a filament that would both provide good illumination and last a decent length of time, with a multitude of failures along the path.

Science is rather different, as major new theories sometimes have to wait for years before they can be either validated or discarded.

The new library in Edinburgh records a litany of financial disasters. I wonder if anyone at RBS (or any of the other banks that ran themselves into the rocks) will be paying it a visit?

 

The Heartland of Innovation

Where would be the most important source for innovation in the world? London, Paris, New York? Birmingham, Cambridge, Los Angeles? Silicon Valley?

Well, historically, none of the above. The answer is New Jersey. Surprising?

Not if one considers the extraordinary stream of life-changing inventions that have flowed from that state.

From Thomas Edison and his teams at Menlo Park came not only the two-way telegraph, the phonograph, electric lighting (not just the light bulb, but all the rest of the necessary paraphernalia), the movie camera, the microphone, batteries for electrically-driven vehicles, but also the first innovation teams, the systematic notion that Big Ideas had to be followed up with rigorous development work, the ability to fund and market breakthrough products successfully and the establishment of celebrity status for inventors.

Also based in New Jersey (after his move from Washington DC) was the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, and his successors at Bell Laboratories, who between them are credited with the invention of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser and several programming languages and operating systems. Together they have won seven Nobel prizes.

Then there’s the Italian inventor of wireless telegraphy and the radio, Guglielmo Marconi, who established one of his pioneering radio stations at New Brunswick NJ.

But perhaps the earliest important innovator to work in the state was Alfred Vail, who, with Samuel Morse, is credited with the development and commercialisation of the telegraph in the late 1830s.

The Shakespeare of Innovation

In the current wholesale revision of the curriculum for primary and secondary schools in England, I don’t see any mention of Thomas Edison. Really he should be at the centre of education for our children, the Shakespeare of technological innovation, embodying as he does:

Breakthrough ideas

Envisioning the future
Systematic creative problem-solving
Sticking at it through thick and thin
Making it happen
Working in project teams
Providing inspirational leadership
Marketing himself and his work
Protecting intellectual property
Raising capital
Selling to key customers
Managing success and learning from failure

Many of these aspects were pioneered by Edison himself.

This is a piece I wrote on him a while back. In so many ways he was, as I wrote, the father of innovation management:

http://www.perdiemprojects.com/Resources/Per%20Diem%20Article-Thomas%20Edi.pdf

The Art of Conversation - is it dead?

I don’t know why there is so much noise in the system about email, Facebook, Twitter, text messaging and the rest – all of them apparently destroying the so-called Art of Conversation.

In reality they do exactly the reverse, bringing new forms of conversation (with old and new friends and acquaintances) via new media.

And the issues involved in dialogue are just the same as in face-to-face intercourse – inability to listen, not sharing the airtime, assuming negative intention, sarcasm masquerading as humour and so on.

Of course there are new social protocols which grow up around each new channel. Enjoyable to learn (and to ignore).

For example, “Hello” was first coined in response to the need for an ice-breaker on new-fangled telephone calls. It’s credited to Thomas Edison in 1877.

Tell it to Edison

Firing a budding entrepreneur from The Apprentice, Lord Sugar explained his decision by telling the contestant: "I've never known an engineer turn his hand to business."

Maybe he should tell that to James Dyson. Or even to Thomas Edison.

Such wisdom…

Edison’s “failures”

Amidst all those amazing inventions that everyone knows about – electric lighting and recorded sound perhaps the most widely recognised – Thomas Edison had his fair share of "failures".

At least that’s how I thought about them initially. It’s clear to me now that most of them were either technical problems that he and his teams could not solve, or ideas too far ahead of their time.

For example, early in the twentieth century he worked on a storage battery that would drive automobiles. He and his teams had already been working on battery design for several decades at this stage. After several years, it turned out that the internal combustion engine was more effective - and petroleum was readily available at that time in what appeared to be an inexhaustible supply.

Wind forward a hundred years and the competition to produce acceptable electrically-powered automobiles is now a major obsession of the motor industry, with billions being invested in development by General Motors and other leading companies. A recent report has signaled that by 2020 electric and other "green" cars will make up a third of global car sales.

Edison must be smiling somewhere.

My own experience is that nearly all “innovations” have been "failures" before they were successful, the gap filled by creative problem-solving.

Is that your experience?

Imagining the Jump-Jet

The recent death of Gordon Lewis, the engineer who pioneered jump-jet technology, prompted me to think about the important role that the Harrier has played in both the British and American military operations over the past four decades.

A view often expressed is that the Falklands war could not have been won without it, and the revolutionary aircraft has been essential to operations in many spheres ever since. Yet the recent British review of military requirements means that it will be retired without any obvious replacement for its unique capabilities.

In the 1950s, the Cold War at its peak, the military needed an aircraft that could take off and land with little or no runway. A French engineer, Michel Wibault, had come up with a proposal which had been rejected in France, so he approached the Bristol Aeroplane Company in Britain, where Gordon Lewis was working. Lewis built on Wibault’s concept, sketching jet engines with a rotating nozzle. This was the great breakthrough, completely outperforming the rival system being developed by Rolls-Royce, which had eight lift engines and one for forward thrust. Of course, when the thing was airborne, the Bristol concept would have far less dead weight to carry.

Yet still the British government of the day was reluctant to support the project, so financial support had to be found in America.

The test flights using this new technology were, to say the least, hazardous. The inherent instability of this new kind of bird meant that emerging problems had to be solved bit by bit. One of the prototypes did indeed crash.

Like his engineering predecessor, Thomas Edison, Gordon Lewis was a multi-talented innovator. Not only did he have big ideas, he also managed and inspired his project teams to solve emerging problems, dealing at the same time with complex commercial issues, often involving international partners.

Thoughts?

Edison and Turning Ideas into Action

For several years I have been talking with participants in innovation workshops around the world about the American inventor, Thomas Edison, and recommending that they study him - his ways of thinking and his methods.

Luckily, Mr Edison will be with us at the last of a short series of innovation masterclasses – “Turning Ideas into Action” – at Cass Business School in London on Thursday 11 November. http://bit.ly/9JfYAc

While Edison’s reputation as an inventor of genius, perhaps the greatest the world has known, is secure and acknowledged throughout the world, his pioneering role - as the father of innovation management - is less widely recognised or understood.

This situation was substantially of his own making, the result of his consistent management of his personal “brand” – a term from a later era, but one which he would have understood well. Edison the Great Inventor bestrode the media of his era, personally creating and managing his reputation as a genius and becoming as a consequence a major celebrity in his own lifetime.

In reality he managed multiple parallel project teams from quite early in his career – teams consisting of brilliant and diverse talents, working together to solve problems and find new solutions. He and his teams often worked by trial and error, assessing sometimes thousands of different possibilities before arriving at an ideal solution.

“The greatest invention of the nineteenth century,” the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “was the invention of the method of invention.”

So, over a century later, why are there such intractable problems in turning ideas into action?

Only connect

I received this from an actor-writer friend, Philip Bird. I think it’s very interesting, full of intriguing and important ideas. What do you make of it?

“I couldn't sleep and for some reason wrote this down.

“The human brain is a wonderful thing, predisposed to look for and find connections between things, often linking different areas of perception in unexpected ways - which is why, for a computer to do what a brain does, it would have to be the size of my house. How each of us makes those connections is an individual mystery, affected by our genes and our exposure to patterns of thought in others - parents, friends, people we admire, some of whom give us permission to think the unthinkable and open doors we didn't even know were there to open.

“To make these connections, to allow our brains to do what they want to do naturally, and in fact can't help doing if released to do it, is the essence of creativity. There is no one creativity, we each have our own. How can we be encouraged to make these connections? To be in an atmosphere of mutual trust and support where egos are left at the door.

“People think 'but if I don't display my ego I will be nothing, just some wishy-washy yes-person bowing to someone else's forceful personality'. But we ask everyone to lose that ego, so that no-one is forcing anyone else. The ego is, after all, only a part of one's personality, the assertive driving look-at-me part. We need to let the brain do its thing, unlimited, unconfined, unfettered, unashamed. People think that only certain people are creative, that some are and some aren't, and they can feel pressured when asked to 'be creative'. That very request may imply that there is a definite end in the view of the questioner, it may put pressure on just by being asked. Somehow the suggestion must be put without pressure; whatever happens must be allowed to happen, with no fixed end in view. Connections will be made, be they wild, funny, synaesthetic, intuitive, if unforced by any agenda, unlimited by preconception. We all have the potential to be creative in our own way, but many of us need the confidence to let it happen.

“There is no-one to please. No-one to impress. I find to be creative I need to carve out some still time first - to look out of the window, deliberately not take anything to do on the train journey, go for a walk, anything which lets the brain work its magic. And it does, in its own individual way, if you wait.”

Philip Bird appears regularly on our stages and film and TV screens. At an “Ideas into Action” Masterclass that I ran at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Philip was Thomas Edison, going on that same evening to be Dr Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor on stage there.