Plea for a culture of error tolerance. By Stephan Sigrist
Everything happens in real time these days. The financial markets are not the only places where split-second decisions are taken; it happens with political agreements and when choosing a partner. Everybody is trained to make straight for the goal without deviating. And anyone who fails to keep up goes under. Yet something essential is lost in the course of this development: imperfection. If you want to keep afloat in the global market long-term, then you need to have the courage to make mistakes, and to be prepared to learn from them. So – just let things go pear-shaped again! Not in a big way, but in little ways. Nature has been setting the example since the emergence of the first life on earth, 4 billion years ago.
By Stephan Sigrist
Pre-school children know it; so do hairdressers; and managers and politicians too. “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”. In the age of the internet and the media, perfecting one’s image and appearance provides the single most important competitive advantage. People who look good clinch more deals at work and find more attractive partners in their private lives. Success or failure is decided in real time. The ability to act and to persuade one’s opposite number unerringly and in a matter of seconds is regarded as a sine qua non in the global world. This compulsion for perfection, however, presents companies, politicians and private individuals with a dilemma; for anyone who thinks and acts for the long term inevitably buys into uncertainty. Politicians, who plan for years ahead, have difficulty when it comes to presenting adequate credentials in terms of achievement at the next election. Companies that deliver poor quarterly results in the short term, because of a longterm growth strategy, are mauled by investors and financial press alike.
FROM EVOLUTION TO DEVOLUTION
The pressure on people to succeed leads to short-termism and unilateralism in individuals, companies and nations: and human beings seek to “optimise themselves” with technical aids. People have been “tuning” their bodies with Viagra and Botox for years. Facebook profiles appear on the internet with enhanced photographs and CVs. In the fields of business and politics, senior figures vaunt the success and inventiveness of the latest products and programmes from their institutions, irrespective of the real value they add. The compulsion to succeed leads to a misconception about innovation, which always links “new” with “better”. The result of such thinking is not infrequently the opposite of what was intended with the best of wills. In certain cases the pressure on innovation can end up being retrogressive, rather than progressive: food manufacturers continue to flood the market with more and more product varieties. Yet hardly any of these foodstuffs end up winning over the consumer. The consequence is a loss of trust and excessive demands. In the motor vehicle sector, Toyota became a victim of its own quality myth and, purely as a result of the pressure to improve, lost sight of its actual aim, which was to ensure the safety of its cars. The result: almost nine million recalls worldwide and damages claims in the millions.
THE VALUE OF ERROR
One fundamental element, which sets human beings apart and which also forms the basis for success and innovation, tends to get forgotten in the process of constantly optimising and perfecting things: imperfection.
Evolution provides us with a good example of the need for processes based on error. Natural selection is based on the principle that organisms continually develop new characteristics over time. These become established if they help the species to survive, but disappear if they do not. In the case of bacteria, this strategy leads to a resistance to antibiotics within a relatively short space of time. We human beings have this principle to thank for the dexterity of our fingers and our capacity of thought. Trial and error depends on the fact that, in the process of procreation, mistakes occur in the copying of genes. When cells divide, some individual components of the DNA are reproduced in a slightly modified form, instead of being identical copies. These changes contribute to the emergence of new characteristics and to their being tested so that, in positive instances, they develop an evolutionary advantage in comparison with other cells.
In contrast to systems and organisations, which factor in errors, those that start out from the premise of a perfect linear development often reap greater failure. On
the one hand the belief in the flawlessness of a system leads to a cavalier underestimation of risks. On the other, society’s condemnation of creative minds whose ideas are not successful, negatively impacts on their willingness to try something new. Failed entrepreneurs are pilloried, scientists whose findings do not reflect current academic thinking can’t get jobs. Musicians who fail to reflect popular taste find themselves boycotted by radio stations. In extreme cases, this leads to a levelling down of thought paradigms in business, science and culture.
IN PRAISE OF IMPERFECTION
Companies that want to stay competitive in the long term need to invest in processes and not only in solutions, in failure and not only in success. Countries and institutions that depend on innovation in the long term, therefore, need a culture of error tolerance which values imperfection and error as an indispensable part of the path of progress. We must at the same time, therefore, persuade nations, companies and individuals not only to adopt a greater awareness of error generally, but to tolerate it in minor instances in order to avoid more major risks. In sectors with high safety risks and hierarchical structures, it has been shown that a system, which makes it possible to report faults anonymously, can lead to a significant improvement in quality. Leading airline companies have introduced flat hierarchies in the cockpit along with an anonymous reporting system for near breakdowns. This enables staff to admit mistakes without being punished for them. In this way organisations can contribute massively to the prevention of crashes. Error-reporting systems like this can also be exported to other sectors, from medicine to banks, oil production companies and politics.
When it comes to the development of drugs, the systematic disclosure of negative results in clinical trials, which are today frequently kept under lock and key, could significantly improve quality for patients, since information about side effects would be readily available. The companies, too, would benefit, since there would be no need to carry out multiple studies with similar substances.
In general terms, there are three conditions to be met for an appropriate culture of error tolerance.
Firstly: a holistic view of the world, which recognises that the latter is more complex than can be explained with linear thought paradigms. Although it is important to develop models for economic or biological phenomena, we should be aware that many areas of research are highly complex and results are of only limited predictability.
Secondly: transparency. Learning from mistakes demands a legal framework as well as a system of incentives which gives private individuals, companies and politicians a motive for making the results of their work public. Only such “open-access” concepts allow us to learn and adapt our existing ideas on the basis of successes and failures.
And thirdly: the courage to embrace the new. To stimulate the maximum possible number of contemporaries to think outside the box, we need above all inspirational examples of people who live by similar values in companies, in politics and in their families. So buy pharmaceutical shares the next time the price crashes and make the effort to praise your daughter even if she took that illegal short cut in the orienteering race. Even if the world will not necessarily become any more innovative as a result, it will nevertheless be a lot more pleasant to live in it.
Stephan Sigrist is Head of the W.I.R.E. Think Tank. The focus of his attention is on developments in the life sciences, and general macro trends in business and society. He took his doctorate at Collegium Helveticum in Zurich and worked as a Senior Researcher at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. After studying biochemistry at ETH Zurich, Stephan Sigrist initially worked in medical research for Hoffmann-La Roche and as a consultant for Roland Berger. He is the author of many publications and a speaker at international conferences.
