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To Err Is Wrong Roger Von Oech (from A Whack on the Side of the Head)

Hits and Misses In the summer of 1979, Boston Red Sox first baseman Carl Yastrzemski became the

fifteenth player in baseball history to reach the three thousand hit plateau. This even drew a

lot of media attention, and for about a week prior to the attainment of this goal, hundreds of

reporters covered Yaz’s every move. Finally, one reporter asked, “Hey Yaz, aren’t you afraid all

of this attention will go to your heard?” Yastrzemski replied, “I look at it this way: in my career

I’ve been up to bat over ten thousand times. That means I’ve been unsuccessful at the plate

over seven thousand times. That fact alone keeps me from getting a swollen head.”

Most people consider success and failure as opposites, but they are actually both

products of the same process. As Yaz suggests, an activity that produces a hit may also produce

a miss. It’s the same with creative thinking. The same energy that generates creative ideas also

produces errors.

Many people are not comfortable with errors. Our educational system, based on the

“right answer” belief, cultivates our thinking in another, more conservative way. From an early

age, we are taught that right answers are good and incorrect answers are bad. This value is

deeply embedded in the incentive system used in most schools:

Right over 90% of the time = “A”

Right over 80% of the time = “B”

Right over 70% of the time = “C”

Right over 60% of the time = “D”

Less than 60% correct, you fail

From this we learn to be right as often as possible and to keep our mistakes to a

minimum. We learn, in other words, that “to err is wrong.”

Playing It Safe With this attitude, you won’t be taking many chances. If you learn that failing even a

little penalizes you (e.g. being wrong only 15% of the time garners you only a “B” performance),

you learn not to make mistakes. And more important, you learn not to put yourself in situations

where you might fail. This leads to conservative thought patterns designed to avoid the stigma

our society puts on “failure.”

I have a friend who recently graduated from college with a Master’s degree in

Journalism. For the last six months, she has been trying to find a job, but to no avail. I talked

with her about her situation, and realized that her problem is that she doesn’t know how to fail.

She went through eighteen years of schooling without ever failing an examination, a paper, a

midterm, a pop-quiz, or a final. Now, she is reluctant to try any approaches where she might

fail. She has been conditioned to believe that failure is bad in and of itself, rather than a

potential stepping stone to new ideas.

Look around. How many middle managers, housewives, administrators, teachers, and

other people do you see who are afraid to try anything new because of this fear of failure?

Most of us have learned not to make mistakes in public. As a result, we remove ourselves from

many learning experiences except for those occurring in the most private of circumstances.

A Different Logic From a practical point of view, “to err is wrong” makes sense. Our survival in the

everyday world requires us to perform thousands of small tasks without failure. Think about it:

you wouldn’t last very long if you were to step out in front of traffic or stick your hand in a pot

of boiling water. In addition, engineers whose bridges collapse, stock brokers who lose money

for their clients, and copywriters whose ad campaigns decrease sales won’t keep their jobs very

long.

Nevertheless, too great an adherence to the belief “to err is wrong” can greatly

undermine your attempts to generate new ideas. If you’re more concerned with producing

right answers that generating original ideas, you’ll probably make uncritical use of the rules,

formulae, and procedures used to obtain these right answers. By doing this, you’ll by-pass the

germinal phase of the creative process, and thus spend little time testing assumptions,

challenging the rules, asking what-if questions, or just playing around with the problem. All of

these techniques will produce some incorrect answers, but in the germinal phases errors are

viewed as a necessary by-product of creative thinking. As Yaz would put it, “If you want the hits,

be prepared for the misses.” That’s the way the game of life goes.

Errors as Stepping Stones Whenever an error pops up, the usual response is “Jeez, another screwup, what went

wrong this time?” The creative thinker, on the other hand, will realize the potential value of

errors, and perhaps say something like, “Would you look at that! Where can it lead our

thinking?” And then he or she will go on to use the error as a stepping stone to a new idea. As a

matter of fact, the whole history of discovery is filled with people who used erroneous

assumptions and failed ideas as stepping stones to new ideas. Columbus thought he was finding

a shorter route to India. Johannes Kepler stumbled on to the idea of interplanetary gravity

because of assumptions which were right for the wrong reasons. And Thomas Edison knew

1800 ways not to build a light bulb.

The following story about the automotive genius Charles Kettering exemplifies the spirit

of working through erroneous assumptions to good ideas. In 1912, when the automobile

industry was just beginning to grow, Kettering was interested in improving gasoline-engine

efficiency. The problem he faced was “knock,” the phenomenon in which gasoline takes too

long to burn in the cylinder—thereby reducing efficiency.

Kettering began searching for ways to eliminate the “knock.” He thought to himself,

“How can I get the gasoline to combust in the cylinder at an earlier time?” The key concept

here is “early.” Searching for analogous situations, he looked around for models of “things that

happen early.” He thought of historical models, physical models, and biological models. Finally,

he remembered a particular plant, the trailing arbutus, which “happens early,” i.e., it blooms in

the snow (“earlier” than other plants). One of this plant’s chief characteristics is its red leaves,

which help the plant retain light at certain wavelengths. Kettering figured that it must be the

red color which made the trailing arbutus bloom earlier.

Now came the critical step in Kettering’s chain of thought. He asked himself, “How can I

make the gasoline red? Perhaps I’ll put red dye in the gasoline—maybe that’ll make it combust

earlier.” He looked around his workshop, and found that he didn’t have any red dye. But he did

happen to have some iodine—perhaps that would do. He added the iodine to the gasoline and,

lo and behold, the engine didn’t “knock.”

Several days later, Kettering wanted to make sure that it was the redness of the iodine

which had in fact solved his problem. He got some red dye and added it to the gasoline.

Nothing happened! Kettering then realized that it wasn’t the “redness” which had solved the

“knock” problem, but certain other properties of iodine. In this case, an error had proven to be

a stepping stone to a better idea. Had he known that “redness” alone was not the solution, he

may not have found his way to the additives in iodine.

Negative Feedback Errors serve another useful purpose: they tell us when to change direction. When things

are going smoothly, we generally don’t think about them. To a great extent, this is because we

function according to the principle of negative feedback. Often it is only when things or people

fail to do their job that they get our attention. For example, you are probably not thinking

about your kneecaps right now; that’s because everything is fine with them. The same goes for

your elbows: they are also performing their function—no problem at all. But if you were to

break a leg, you would immediately notice all of the things you could no longer do, but which

you used to take for granted.

Negative feedback means that the current approach is not working, and it is up to you

to figure out a new one. We learn by trial and error, not by trial and rightness. If we did things

correctly every time, we would never have to change direction—we’d just continue the current

course and end up with more of the same.

For example, after the supertanker Amoco Cadiz broke up off the coast of Brittany in the

spring of 1978, thereby polluting the coast with hundreds of thousands of tons of oil, the oil

industry rethought many of its safety standards regarding petroleum transport. The same thing

happened after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in 1979—many

procedures and safety standards were changed.

Neil Goldschmidt, former secretary of transportation, had this to say about the Bay Area

Rapid Transit (BART):

It’s gotten too fashionable around the country to beat up on BART and not give credit to the vision that put this system in place. We have learned from BART around the country. The lessons were put to use in Washington, in Atlanta, in Buffalo, and other cities where we are building mass transit systems. One of the lessons is not to build a system like BART. We learn by our failures. A person’s errors are the whacks that lead him to think differently.

Trying New Things Your error rate in any activity is a function of your familiarity with the activity. If you are

doing things that are routine and have high likelihood of correctness, then you will probably

make very few errors. But if you are doing things that have no precedence in your experience or

are trying different approaches, then you will be making your share of mistakes. Innovators

may not bat a thousand—far from it—but they do get new ideas.

The creative director of an advertising agency told me that he isn’t happy unless he is

failing at least half of the time. As he puts it, “If you are going to be original, you are going to be

wrong a lot.”

One of my clients, the president of a fast-growing computer company, tells his people:

“We’re innovators. We’re doing things nobody has done before. Therefore, we are going to be

making mistakes. My advice to you: make your mistakes, but make them in a hurry.”

Another client, a division manager of a high-technology company, asked his vice

president of engineering what percentage of their new products should be successful in the

marketplace. The answer he received was “about 50%.” The division manager replied, “That’s

too high. 30% is a better target; otherwise, we’ll be too conservative in our planning.”

Along similar lines, in the banking industry, it is said that if the credit manager never has

to default on any of his loans, it’s a sure sign he’s not being aggressive enough in the

marketplace.

Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, has similar words: “The way to succeed is to

double your failure rate.”

Thus errors, at the very least, are a sign that we are diverging from the main road and

trying different approaches.

Nature’s Errors Nature serves as a good example of how trial and error can be used to make changes.

Every now and then, genetic mutations occur—errors in gene reproduction. Most of the time,

these mutations have a deleterious effect on the species, and they drop out of the gene pool.

But occasionally, a mutation provides the species with something beneficial, and that change

will be passed on to future generations. The rich variety of all species is due to this trial and

error process. If there had never been any mutations from the first amoeba, where would we

be now?

Summary There are places where errors are inappropriate, but the germinal phase of the creative

process isn’t one of them. Errors are a sign that you are diverging from the well-traveled path. If

you’re not failing every now and then, it’s a sign you’re not being very innovative.

Tip #1:

If you make an error, use it as a stepping stone to a new idea you might not have otherwise

discovered.

Tip #2:

Differentiate between errors of “commission” and those of “omission.” The latter can be more

costly than the former. If you’re not making many errors, you might ask yourself, “How many

opportunities am I missing by not being more aggressive?”

Tip #3:

Strengthen your “risk muscle.” Everyone has one, but you have to exercise it or else it will

atrophy. Make it a point to take at least one risk every twenty-four hours.

Tip #4:

Remember these two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what does work; and

second, the failure gives you an opportunity to try a new approach.

To Err Is Wrong Roger Von Oech (from A Whack on the Side of the Head)

Hits and Misses In the summer of 1979, Boston Red Sox first baseman Carl Yastrzemski became the

fifteenth player in baseball history to reach the three thousand hit plateau. This even drew a

lot of media attention, and for about a week prior to the attainment of this goal, hundreds of

reporters covered Yaz’s every move. Finally, one reporter asked, “Hey Yaz, aren’t you afraid all

of this attention will go to your heard?” Yastrzemski replied, “I look at it this way: in my career

I’ve been up to bat over ten thousand times. That means I’ve been unsuccessful at the plate

over seven thousand times. That fact alone keeps me from getting a swollen head.”

Most people consider success and failure as opposites, but they are actually both

products of the same process. As Yaz suggests, an activity that produces a hit may also produce

a miss. It’s the same with creative thinking. The same energy that generates creative ideas also

produces errors.

Many people are not comfortable with errors. Our educational system, based on the

“right answer” belief, cultivates our thinking in another, more conservative way. From an early

age, we are taught that right answers are good and incorrect answers are bad. This value is

deeply embedded in the incentive system used in most schools:

Right over 90% of the time = “A”

Right over 80% of the time = “B”

Right over 70% of the time = “C”

Right over 60% of the time = “D”

Less than 60% correct, you fail

From this we learn to be right as often as possible and to keep our mistakes to a

minimum. We learn, in other words, that “to err is wrong.”

Playing It Safe With this attitude, you won’t be taking many chances. If you learn that failing even a

little penalizes you (e.g. being wrong only 15% of the time garners you only a “B” performance),

you learn not to make mistakes. And more important, you learn not to put yourself in situations

where you might fail. This leads to conservative thought patterns designed to avoid the stigma

our society puts on “failure.”

I have a friend who recently graduated from college with a Master’s degree in

Journalism. For the last six months, she has been trying to find a job, but to no avail. I talked

with her about her situation, and realized that her problem is that she doesn’t know how to fail.

She went through eighteen years of schooling without ever failing an examination, a paper, a

midterm, a pop-quiz, or a final. Now, she is reluctant to try any approaches where she might

fail. She has been conditioned to believe that failure is bad in and of itself, rather than a

potential stepping stone to new ideas.

Look around. How many middle managers, housewives, administrators, teachers, and

other people do you see who are afraid to try anything new because of this fear of failure?

Most of us have learned not to make mistakes in public. As a result, we remove ourselves from

many learning experiences except for those occurring in the most private of circumstances.

A Different Logic From a practical point of view, “to err is wrong” makes sense. Our survival in the

everyday world requires us to perform thousands of small tasks without failure. Think about it:

you wouldn’t last very long if you were to step out in front of traffic or stick your hand in a pot

of boiling water. In addition, engineers whose bridges collapse, stock brokers who lose money

for their clients, and copywriters whose ad campaigns decrease sales won’t keep their jobs very

long.

Nevertheless, too great an adherence to the belief “to err is wrong” can greatly

undermine your attempts to generate new ideas. If you’re more concerned with producing

right answers that generating original ideas, you’ll probably make uncritical use of the rules,

formulae, and procedures used to obtain these right answers. By doing this, you’ll by-pass the

germinal phase of the creative process, and thus spend little time testing assumptions,

challenging the rules, asking what-if questions, or just playing around with the problem. All of

these techniques will produce some incorrect answers, but in the germinal phases errors are

viewed as a necessary by-product of creative thinking. As Yaz would put it, “If you want the hits,

be prepared for the misses.” That’s the way the game of life goes.

Errors as Stepping Stones Whenever an error pops up, the usual response is “Jeez, another screwup, what went

wrong this time?” The creative thinker, on the other hand, will realize the potential value of

errors, and perhaps say something like, “Would you look at that! Where can it lead our

thinking?” And then he or she will go on to use the error as a stepping stone to a new idea. As a

matter of fact, the whole history of discovery is filled with people who used erroneous

assumptions and failed ideas as stepping stones to new ideas. Columbus thought he was finding

a shorter route to India. Johannes Kepler stumbled on to the idea of interplanetary gravity

because of assumptions which were right for the wrong reasons. And Thomas Edison knew

1800 ways not to build a light bulb.

The following story about the automotive genius Charles Kettering exemplifies the spirit

of working through erroneous assumptions to good ideas. In 1912, when the automobile

industry was just beginning to grow, Kettering was interested in improving gasoline-engine

efficiency. The problem he faced was “knock,” the phenomenon in which gasoline takes too

long to burn in the cylinder—thereby reducing efficiency.

Kettering began searching for ways to eliminate the “knock.” He thought to himself,

“How can I get the gasoline to combust in the cylinder at an earlier time?” The key concept

here is “early.” Searching for analogous situations, he looked around for models of “things that

happen early.” He thought of historical models, physical models, and biological models. Finally,

he remembered a particular plant, the trailing arbutus, which “happens early,” i.e., it blooms in

the snow (“earlier” than other plants). One of this plant’s chief characteristics is its red leaves,

which help the plant retain light at certain wavelengths. Kettering figured that it must be the

red color which made the trailing arbutus bloom earlier.

Now came the critical step in Kettering’s chain of thought. He asked himself, “How can I

make the gasoline red? Perhaps I’ll put red dye in the gasoline—maybe that’ll make it combust

earlier.” He looked around his workshop, and found that he didn’t have any red dye. But he did

happen to have some iodine—perhaps that would do. He added the iodine to the gasoline and,

lo and behold, the engine didn’t “knock.”

Several days later, Kettering wanted to make sure that it was the redness of the iodine

which had in fact solved his problem. He got some red dye and added it to the gasoline.

Nothing happened! Kettering then realized that it wasn’t the “redness” which had solved the

“knock” problem, but certain other properties of iodine. In this case, an error had proven to be

a stepping stone to a better idea. Had he known that “redness” alone was not the solution, he

may not have found his way to the additives in iodine.

Negative Feedback Errors serve another useful purpose: they tell us when to change direction. When things

are going smoothly, we generally don’t think about them. To a great extent, this is because we

function according to the principle of negative feedback. Often it is only when things or people

fail to do their job that they get our attention. For example, you are probably not thinking

about your kneecaps right now; that’s because everything is fine with them. The same goes for

your elbows: they are also performing their function—no problem at all. But if you were to

break a leg, you would immediately notice all of the things you could no longer do, but which

you used to take for granted.

Negative feedback means that the current approach is not working, and it is up to you

to figure out a new one. We learn by trial and error, not by trial and rightness. If we did things

correctly every time, we would never have to change direction—we’d just continue the current

course and end up with more of the same.

For example, after the supertanker Amoco Cadiz broke up off the coast of Brittany in the

spring of 1978, thereby polluting the coast with hundreds of thousands of tons of oil, the oil

industry rethought many of its safety standards regarding petroleum transport. The same thing

happened after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in 1979—many

procedures and safety standards were changed.

Neil Goldschmidt, former secretary of transportation, had this to say about the Bay Area

Rapid Transit (BART):

It’s gotten too fashionable around the country to beat up on BART and not give credit to the vision that put this system in place. We have learned from BART around the country. The lessons were put to use in Washington, in Atlanta, in Buffalo, and other cities where we are building mass transit systems. One of the lessons is not to build a system like BART. We learn by our failures. A person’s errors are the whacks that lead him to think differently.

Trying New Things Your error rate in any activity is a function of your familiarity with the activity. If you are

doing things that are routine and have high likelihood of correctness, then you will probably

make very few errors. But if you are doing things that have no precedence in your experience or

are trying different approaches, then you will be making your share of mistakes. Innovators

may not bat a thousand—far from it—but they do get new ideas.

The creative director of an advertising agency told me that he isn’t happy unless he is

failing at least half of the time. As he puts it, “If you are going to be original, you are going to be

wrong a lot.”

One of my clients, the president of a fast-growing computer company, tells his people:

“We’re innovators. We’re doing things nobody has done before. Therefore, we are going to be

making mistakes. My advice to you: make your mistakes, but make them in a hurry.”

Another client, a division manager of a high-technology company, asked his vice

president of engineering what percentage of their new products should be successful in the

marketplace. The answer he received was “about 50%.” The division manager replied, “That’s

too high. 30% is a better target; otherwise, we’ll be too conservative in our planning.”

Along similar lines, in the banking industry, it is said that if the credit manager never has

to default on any of his loans, it’s a sure sign he’s not being aggressive enough in the

marketplace.

Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, has similar words: “The way to succeed is to

double your failure rate.”

Thus errors, at the very least, are a sign that we are diverging from the main road and

trying different approaches.

Nature’s Errors Nature serves as a good example of how trial and error can be used to make changes.

Every now and then, genetic mutations occur—errors in gene reproduction. Most of the time,

these mutations have a deleterious effect on the species, and they drop out of the gene pool.

But occasionally, a mutation provides the species with something beneficial, and that change

will be passed on to future generations. The rich variety of all species is due to this trial and

error process. If there had never been any mutations from the first amoeba, where would we

be now?

Summary There are places where errors are inappropriate, but the germinal phase of the creative

process isn’t one of them. Errors are a sign that you are diverging from the well-traveled path. If

you’re not failing every now and then, it’s a sign you’re not being very innovative.

Tip #1:

If you make an error, use it as a stepping stone to a new idea you might not have otherwise

discovered.

Tip #2:

Differentiate between errors of “commission” and those of “omission.” The latter can be more

costly than the former. If you’re not making many errors, you might ask yourself, “How many

opportunities am I missing by not being more aggressive?”

Tip #3:

Strengthen your “risk muscle.” Everyone has one, but you have to exercise it or else it will

atrophy. Make it a point to take at least one risk every twenty-four hours.

Tip #4:

Remember these two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what does work; and

second, the failure gives you an opportunity to try a new approach.