Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure

Pluralism matters because life is not worth living without new experiences - new people, new places, new challenges. But discipline matters too; we cannot simply treat life as a psychedelic trip through a series of novel sensations.

Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgment. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy. What matters is how quickly the leader is able to adapt.

The evolutionary algorithm--of variation and selection, repeated--searches for solutions in a world where the problems keep changing, trying all sorts of variants and doing more of what works.

The Most successful industry of the last forty years has been built on failure after failure after failure.

And the fundamental point of all these massively parallel experiments is the same: when a problem reaches a certain level of complexity, formal theory won’t get you nearly as far as an incredibly rapid, systematic process of trial and error.

Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition,’ he

Few human inventions are more complex and tightly coupled than the banking system; Charles

Here’s the thing about failure in innovation: it’s a price worth paying. We

In Iraq, the Army discovered that if the official hierarchy was on a disastrous course, it was vital to bypass it in order to adapt. Petraeus

Palchinsky principles’: 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

Given the likely shape of these ever-shifting landscapes, the evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wold gambles is the best possible way to search for solutions.

It may be satisfying to castigate the likes of Geithner and the heads of Lehman Brothers and AIG, but safety experts like Perrow know it is far more productive to design better systems than to hope for better people.

Ormerod’s discovery strongly implies that effective planning is rare in the modern economy.

The complexity of the society we have created for ourselves envelops us so completely that, instead of being dizzied, we take it for granted.

Doing foolish things in an attempt ‘to correct the past’, like marrying the man whose baby you just aborted, isn’t unusual at all.

A different psychological process, but with a similar effect on our ability to learn from our mistakes, is simply to reinterpret our failures as successes. We persuade ourselves that what we did was not that bad; in fact, everything worked out for the best.

While denial is the process of refusing to acknowledge a mistake, and loss-chasing is the process of causing more damage while trying to hastily erase the mistake, hedonic editing is a subtler process of convincing ourselves that the mistake doesn’t matter.

All because, to quote the psychologists Kahneman and Tversky, he had not ‘made peace with his losses’. Making peace with our losses can be unbearably difficult to do

First, try new things, expecting that some will fail. Second, make failure survivable: create safe spaces for failure or move forward in small steps. As we saw with banks and cities, the trick here is finding the right scale in which to experiment: significant enough to make a difference, but not such a gamble that you’re ruined if it fails. And third, make sure you know when you’ve failed, or you will never learn. As we shall see in the next chapter, this last one is especially difficult when it comes to adapting in our own lives.

As the biochemist Leslie Orgel famously remarked, ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are’, meaning that when an evolutionary process is let loose upon a problem, it will often find solutions that no human designer would have dreamed of.

It’s easy to see why the idea of controlled experiments on coronary care patients might make people queasy. What Archie Cochrane had the courage to understand is that the alternative to controlled experiments is uncontrolled experiments. These are worse, because they teach us little or nothing.

A doctor who wants to run a properly controlled trial to test these two options needs approval from an ethics committee. A doctor who prescribes one or the other arbitrarily (there being no other basis for the decision), and who makes no special note of the results, needs to satisfy no higher authority. He’s simply regarded as doing his job.

An empiricist, I was willing to learn by my mistakes and those of others.’ – Muhammad Yunus ‘The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.’ – Bill Gates

Hayek believed that most people overestimated the value of centralised knowledge, and tended to overlook ‘knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place’.

Galvin told Petraeus that the most important part of the job was to criticise his boss: ‘It’s my job to run the division, and it’s your job to critique me.’ Petraeus protested but Galvin insisted, so each month the young captain would leave a report card in his boss’s in-tray. It was a vital lesson for an officer unwilling to admit mistakes.

And distinguishing success from failure, oddly, can be the hardest task of all: arrogant leaders can ignore the distinction; our own denial can blur it; and the sheer complexity of the world can make the distinction hard to draw even for the most objective judge.

Along the way, we’ll also be learning about the recipe for successfully adapting. The three essential steps are: to try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; to make failure survivable, because it will be common; and to make sure that you know when you’ve failed.

The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk: ‘a person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise’.

General Electric and Shell were also in the top ten both in 1912 and in 1995. But none of the other top-ten titans was in the top ten by 1995. More remarkably, none of them was even in the top hundred. Names such as Pullman and Singer recall a bygone age. Others, such as J&P Coats, Anaconda and International Harvester, are barely recognisable.