Learning from Mistakes

But it’s not a process limited to life forms. By embracing mistakes, and using them as catalysts for growth, businesses can cultivate a mindset that fosters change and growth. Writing in his book, Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed notes that there are two key elements involved in learning from mistakes. One: you need the right system in place. And two: you need to nurture a mindset that enables such a system to flourish.

Clogged nozzles

One of the most intriguing aspects of this approach is the idea of trial and error. Harford likens it to the way nature operates through natural selection, involving as it does continuous experimentation, and acknowledging that failure is an integral part of the process. A problem Unilever faced in the 1960s offers an illuminating example.

One of the company’s products was washing powder. The problem wasn’t with the formula for the powder, but the nozzles used to produce that powder. They kept clogging up, which produced different sized grains – which led to poor quality powder. Sales declined. So Unilever called in experts – everyone from mathematicians to fluid mechanics - to solve the problem. They couldn’t. It wasn't until – almost as a last resort – the company turned to its biology team, that they finally fixed the problem.

The biologists made ten nozzles, each one slightly different from the other, and tested them to failure. They then took the nozzle with the least faults and made ten copies of that; again, each with slight differences. They kept repeating this process, winnowing out the failures and retaining the successes until, after 449 ‘failures’, they came up with a nozzle that worked perfectly. In effect, they mimicked the process of natural selection, persisting with failure and adaptation until they found just what they needed.

The story is a reminder that failure isn't a roadblock, but a stepping-stone on the path to success.

Admitting failure

However, embracing mistakes isn't always easy. Faced with evidence that contradicts our core beliefs, we often become uncomfortable. We tend to reshape the evidence rather than adjust our beliefs. We resort, as Matthew Syed says, to reframing, filtering, spinning, or outright ignoring evidence to maintain the comforting assumption that we’ve been right all along. And it’s this tendency that prevents us from acknowledging our mistakes, which in turn perpetuates a cycle of repeated errors. As the philosopher Karl Popper once said, ‘True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.’ 

Yet for all this, people – and businesses - often resort to convenient excuses rather than face their errors head-on. They deny what’s gone wrong, or shift the blame elsewhere. But this solves nothing. All it does is lead to a repetition of the same mistakes.

Not every business does this. It’s an approach, for example, very definitely not held by the airline industry. And in this regard, it serves as an exemplar in the handling of errors. It acknowledges and thoroughly investigates every failure all the time, and keeps investigating until it’s determined, without doubt, the reasons for that failure. It’s an approach that ought to be embraced by all businesses. Not just to promote accountability, but to foster and encourage continuous improvement.

Experiment. Investigate. Learn

For Tim Harford, a business intent on success needs to adhere to three key principles. One: it should encourage experimentation and be prepared for inevitable failures. Two: it should create safe spaces where failure isn't seen as catastrophic, but as something that could lead to valuable insights. Three: it must 100% accept failure as an opportunity to learn. 

All three principles emphasize the importance of challenging possibilities, valuable feedback, and relentless improvement. If innovation and product development are to succeed, they demand an environment in which trial and error are not only accepted but encouraged—a sanctuary where failure is seen as a stepping-stone toward progress.

To me, such an approach seems self-evidently sensible. Yet there’s still a prevailing trend among executives and consultants in business today to focus on large-scale projects and quick, national expansion. They look for short-term gains, regret failure and move on from it. They dismiss out of hand the concepts of trial and error, and learning from mistakes.

And that in itself, I believe, is an even bigger mistake. 

Food for creative thinking 

Adapt underscores the importance of embracing mistakes and cultivating a mindset that values learning from them. Trial and error, inspired by nature's evolutionary principles, provides an excellent framework for persistent experimentation and growth. Because in today’s fast and ever-changing commercial landscapes, it’s the businesses that see the benefits of adaptation, and create environments to foster experimentation, that will achieve true innovation and sustainable growth.