To improve you must learn
Unfortunately, you only learn when you mess things up. You only learn how to ride a bike by falling off one. If you didn’t fall off, then you didn’t learn (I guess you already knew how to ride it).
If you try something new and it works first time, fresh out of the box, then congratulations; but you only reinforced what you already knew to be true — call me a pedant but that is not learning.
It is an interesting philosophical point with a hard tangible implication:
You need a pilot plant
If you want to learn you need an environment where you can mess up safely:
- Somewhere where people don’t get shouted at when it doesn’t work
- Somewhere where you are happy to invest the money in failure
- Somewhere where you accurately measure the outcome
- Somewhere where you expect to try again and again and again
If you don’t have a test bed or innovation centre or trial room or — call it what you will — learning will be a very expensive and short-lived experience.
Where is your pilot plant?
Author: Jonty Pearce
Published On: 24th Mar 2015 - Last modified: 10th Nov 2017
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