Where Good Ideas Come From: Chapter 5, Error

·      Errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.  William Staley Jevons is making a more subtle case for the role of error in innovation, because error is not simply a phase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

·      When we are wrong, we have to challenge our assumptions, adopt new strategies. Being wrong on its own doesn’t unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them.

·      The trouble with error is that we have a natural tendency to dismiss it.

·      Coming at a problem from a different perspective, with few preconceived ideas about what the “correct” result was supposed to be, allows conceptualizing scenarios where the mistake might actually be meaningful.

·      Good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error. You would think that innovation would be more strongly correlated with the values of accuracy, clarity, and focus. A good idea because they tens to have a high signal to noise ratio. But that doesn’t mean you want to cultivate those ideas in noise free environments, because, noise free environments end up being too sterile and predictable in their output. The best innovation labs are always a little contaminated.

·      Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demands of quality control over whelm them. Big organizations like to follow perfectionist regimes, that have entire systems devoted to eliminating error from the conference room or the assembly line, but it is no accident that one of the mantras of the Web startup world is FAIL FASTER. It is not that mistakes are the goal – they are still mistakes, after all, which is why you want to get through them quickly. But those mistakes are an inevitable step on the path to true innovation.

Benjamin Franklin, who knew a few things about innovation himself, said it best, “Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified