kip/bot/blog

The celebration of failure has become a tired, counterproductive meme.

Sure, the tension involved in celebrating something normally thought to be bad gets your attention. It’s also a way to get people out of their comfort zone. So cheers for that.

But, really, we actually want to succeed and the more I read about failing forward, failing your way to success, and not being able to succeed without failing, the more I think the word does us a disservice on several levels. For starters, failure, it’s important to remember, is a broad umbrella. On the positive side, the one that’s worthy of fetishizing, it includes things that happened not to work. They didn’t fail so much as the client didn’t buy it, the market wasn’t ready for it, it was ahead of its time, or it was a good idea but not popular enough to be profitable. On the negative, however, failure also includes (and originally meant) screw-ups, incompetence, miscalculations, and arrogant dilettantism masquerading as expertise.

The problem is that the word failure doesn’t contain within it the means for evaluating good ones and bad ones. Failure doesn’t have an internal quality metric in its meaning that helps us identify the ones that actually advance the work and ones that should result in heads being knocked, going back to the drawing board, hitting the books, or putting together a new team.

Celebrating failure doesn’t help us increase our likelihood of doing quality work so much as it increases our chances of stumbling into it. By celebrating failure, we encourage peolpe and teams to try more, and more risky, ideas. But we don’t encourage people to focus on craft, execution, or a notion of quality. For some cultures, this might be good. If you’re in an environment that is so stale and idea-less that no one ever goes beyond the obvious, than you may need that jolt. But, in an environment that is already supposed to be about creativity, innovation, and design, you’re probably dumbing the place down. By talking about failure, rather than iteration and revving, we’re not advancing design thinking so much as inflating attitude. The word failure doesn’t have enough oomph in it to get people thinking.

Worst of all, I think, celebrating failure gives teams and people easy outs when something doesn’t go well. Since failure doesn’t contain a quality metric we have trouble describing what constitutes a useful failure. Most conversations about failure assume that everyone knows the actual complete screw-ups (do we really?) but don’t help identify the earnest, but ultimately wasteful, failures. As a result, when we fail, it’s easy to describe one’s self as taking a shot and missing but then celebrate the taking of the shot anyway. Rather than critique something to find out what the hell went wrong or, more productively, what do we do better, celebrating a failure implies that things were fine, it just didn’t work out.

To be clear, I think we should promote the taking of risks. I absolutely believe that the quality of an idea — its originality, elegance, or efficiency in solving a problem or doing something new and wonderful — should be celebrated even if the product ultimately doesn’t succeed in the marketplace or isn’t approved by the client. (I also think it would be an interesting exercise to see if celebrants of failure in the design world are willing to go so far as to call the Segway, Zune, and the XO successful failures.) But I think we should celebrate failure in a very different way: by calling it iteration, critique and refinement. Better yet, let’s call it experiment.

Experimentation is a much better word to use, though I already know it’s too wonky and beaker-y to catch on. Still, it’s worth talking about the difference if only to make the word we’ll be stuck with for the next year — FAILURE! — meaningful. Here’s the difference:

Let’s use a fresh example from an unexpected place: the iPhone. This is from the WIRED cover story:

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting

Jobs rather famously doesn’t celebrate failure. What he’s done in this moment is call something what it is — inadequate, not acceptable, deeply troubling. At the same time, however, he didn’t throw a tantrum. There was a critique in his assessment of the prototype/iteration/rev/version/experiment/failure — and it went beyond the bugs. Bugs can be solved and closed, the bigger issue was that it wasn’t coming together as a coherent product. That was a design moment, an experiment being evaluated — there was no celebration of failure.

As Nick Cage so memorably re-told the story in the immortal national treasure National Treasure: “When Thomas Edison was asked how it felt to fail 99 times trying to invent the light bulb, Edison said ‘I didn’t fail 99 times. I discovered 99 ways how NOT to make a light bulb.’”

Stop failing and patting yourself on the back for it. Start experimenting and stay focused on quality and success.

Nifty little exercise where a group of designers turn a train station staircase into a piano keyboard (a la the classic scene from Big) in order to get people to engage in the healthier behavior of taking the stairs rather than the escalator. THey conclude:

“Fun can obviously change behavior for the better” and the slightly more difficult translation “Add fun changes common behavior”

An ignite talk by Mark Argo about the increasing open-sourcing and personalization of gadgets begins with a fun account of the way in which the word gadget has evolved and been depreciated. According the usual on-line sources (OED, dictionary.com, Wikipedia), the origin of gadget is not entirely clear, but there was a late-19th early-20th century sense that gadget was originally a good thing. An early appearance of the word occurs in the 1918 memoir of a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps (”Above the Clouds”): “our ennui was occasionally relieved by new gadgets — “gadget” is the Flying Corps slang for invention! Some gadgets were good, some comic, and some extraordinary.”

Argo highlights that gadget covered useful inventions back in the day and lightly laments its devolution. (Think how it is used today: “gadget” plays are gimmicks in football and seen most frequently in bad football movies; gadget freaks are unnaturally attached to their devices; gadget and gizmo are ways for normal people (either the hero or the villainous suit who doesn’t get it) to marginalize something as esoteric).) Argo kind of undermines his attempt to recover the word by highlighting some laughable, if useful (who knows), canes: one has a ruler for measuring horses at the racetrack, one has doctor supplies.

One of the things this sparked for me, was that we no longer have a word that covers the sense of invention in the “Above the Clouds” quote. Something that highlights the excitement and potential value of something. The Name of the Rose (one of my favorite movies and favorite books) has a great gadget scene in which Brother William (of Baskerville . . . get it?) is inspecting a book and whips out a crude pair of glasses.

This gets the other brothers all a-twitter:

Which prompts the best Sean Connery picture ever:

An earlier scene shows Brother William’s other ‘dangerous’ possessions:

In the scene, Brother William slowly unpacks the items (for our benefit) but, the moment he hears footsteps (of the approaching abbot), he throws a cloth over them and assumes a casual air. The gadgets are an hourglass and an astrolabe. (Brother William takes astronomical measurements at night.)

I love how these things have life-changing and even heretical potential. Sadly, my mind, now owned by marketing-speak, can only come up with tepid words: innovation, game-changing, category-creator, novelty, differentiator. Invention has potential, but it goes to sad cranks toiling in their workshop hoping to strike it rich with their invention (and the inevitable cliche of the inventor who actually does create something great, but never sees the rewards). Gadget’s not terribly exciting, but it has some of the energy of the word invention back in the day.

On his site, Argo lists the links he refers ton in a delightfully low-rent way:

Here’s a mini-version of the upcoming documentary about William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind:

Watching it today, William’s comment about needing electricity to get to the internet (at 5:21) struck me: “Most people want internet technology, but they can’t use internet technology without electricity.”

This reminds me of some of the smug criticisms of the OLPC project, where critics were piling on that it was inappropriate to provide web access, learning tools, and technology to these countries when there were other pressing needs. While I don’t disagree that there are other pressing needs, this blithe criticism seems ill-informed in light of what William has done for his village with access to a small number of (old) books and the way he has framed electricity as a path to economic development, prevention of famine, increased education, and more culture and enjoyment of life.

Just finishing The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind as the author, William Kamkwamba caps off his US speaking tour with a Daily Show interview (tomorrow). With the money he has raised, William has added solar panels to his village, another windmill and has achieved his goal of irrigating the land for a second season of planting. Now, he’s raising money for a variety of projects on his website.

There is a great range of things to donate to:

Wimbe Primary School Windmill
Cost: $300
Priority: medium

Books for Village Library
Cost: The need for books is high. $3,000-$5,000 will help further this extensive project.
Priority: high

Practice Jerseys and Children’s-Size Soccer Balls for Wimbe Primary School
Cost: $700, including shipping
Priority: high

Women’s Netball Uniforms
Cost: approximately $5,000
Priority: medium

Secondary School Scholarships
Cost: $2,000 for 20 students (10 in public school, 10 in boarding school)
Priority: high

Football Goal Nets (Soccer)
Cost: $3,000
Priority: medium

New Primary School
Cost: estimated at a minimum of $50,000
Priority: medium

I like the priorities here: the new school is less of a priority than the scholarships, which are the same priority as soccer balls. It’s realistic about giving kids a complete education and life. (For my part, I donated to the book initiative.)

About 3/4 of the way through The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (that’s the Amazon link, the author’s site is here). Terrific book on so many levels. In short, it’s the story of a 13 - 14 year Malawian boy (William Kamkwmaba) who, unable to pay tuition for school after a devastating famine (which his family managed to survive) spends his time reading books about electricity and manages to build, over the course of several months, a windmill (seen above). The story is broader, covering life in his village, the tragic story of the famine, but the arc points towards the windmill.

Oddly, despite my bleeding heart-left tendencies, this is the first time I’ve read a first person account of life during a famine or day-to-day living anywhere in Africa, so nearly everything in the book was a revelation. Right from the beginning, there’s the mix of magic and science in William’s life:

BEFORE I DISCOVERED THE miracles of science, magic ruled the world. Magic and its many mysteries were a presence that hovered about constantly, giving me my earliest memory as a boy—the time my father saved me from

His discovery of science is classic circuit-bender/hacking:

the integrated circuit are little things that look like beans. These are transistors, and they control the power that moves through the radio into the speakers. Geoffrey and I learned this by disconnecting one transistor and hearing the volume greatly reduce. We didn’t own a proper soldering iron, so to perform repairs on the circuit boards, we heated a thick wire over the kitchen fire until it became red hot, then used it to fuse the metal joints together.

Working with whatever left-over pieces he can find, he experiments with anything he can get his hands on and open. In this case, the radio-hacking led to a small repair business. William’s self-education in electronics is interrupted by the famine which nearly kills his immediate family and takes a toll on everyone around him. He describes a funeral tradition from his uncle’s burial, which reminded me of how little I actually know about Africa:

every grave has a hidden compartment at the bottom—usually a smaller cubbyhole carved into the side of the pit—where the coffin slides in. It’s like having your own little bedroom in death. The purpose is to protect the deceased from the falling dirt, or really, to keep the family from seeing the falling dirt land on the coffin.

In the midst of the famine — which is several months of excruciating hunger and day-to-day management of its pains and attempts to secure and ration food — William writes, “DURING THIS TIME OF trouble, I discovered the bicycle dynamo.” The whole book is written with an innocent sense-of-wonder voice and you gotta love a chapter that starts like this. The bicycle dynamo is the little device that attaches to a bike wheel and turns the pedaling into electricity. William’s dissection of the device leads him to a bigger vision:

Without realizing it, I’d just discovered the difference between alternating and direct current. Of course, I wouldn’t know what this meant until much later. After a few minutes of pedaling this upside-down bike by hand, my arm grew tired and the radio slowly died. So I began thinking, What can do the pedaling for us so Geoffrey and I can dance? The dynamo had given me a small taste of electricity, and that made me want to figure out how to create my own. Only 2 percent of Malawians have electricity, and this is a huge problem. Having no electricity meant no lights, which meant I could never do anything at night, such as study or finish my radio repairs, much less see the roaches, mice, and spiders that crawled the walls and floors in the dark. Once the sun goes down, and if there’s no moon, everyone stops what they’re doing, brushes their teeth, and just goes to sleep. Not at 10:00 P.M., or even nine o’clock—but seven in the evening! Who goes to bed at seven in the evening? Well, I can tell you, most of Africa.

This sets up what is at stake as William spends his schoolless months trolling through scrap heaps, digging up unused PVC, pillaging parts from junk, and experimenting with ways to turn a bicycle dynamo into a wind-based power source. There’s so much to write about from this book (what his education was like when he could afford it, the local economy’s more nuanced functioning, how world culture finds it way into his village via radio and the near-random cinema showings), so I’ll reco the book and grab a few more quotes about his inventor side.

Inventiveness:

I didn’t have a drill, so I had to make my own. First I heated a long nail in the fire, then drove it through a half a maize cob, creating a handle. I placed the nail back on the coals until it became red hot, then used it to bore holes into both sets of plastic blades. I then wired them together. I didn’t have any pliers, so I used two bicycle spokes to bend and tighten the wires on the blades.

The power of self-education:

One day I was looking in some weeds and found the differential of a four-wheel drive. Using my screwdriver, I pried it open and discovered loads of fresh black engine grease. I scraped it into a plastic bag for future use. I also found cotter pins and tangled bits of wire, in addition to things I’d probably never use—brake pedals, gear levers, and the crankshaft of a small car engine.

William’s dreams:

One day I pretended to be a great mechanic, crawling on my back under the old rusted cars and tractors with the tall grass clutching me in its arms. I shouted up to the customer. “Start it up! Let’s see how she sounds…push the gas, don’t be shy! Whoa, whoa, whoa! That’s too much!” The engine didn’t sound right, so I gave it to them straight: “Looks like you’ll need an overhaul. I know, I know, it’s expensive, but it’s life.” I shouted to my other mechanics, who were slacking as usual. “Phiri, today you’re doing oil changes!” “Yes, boss!”

His vision:

Once I had more wire and a car battery, I explained, I could store electricity for the times when the wind stops blowing. It could also provide light for the entire house. It would have to be done little by little, but once complete, it would save my parents the money they normally spent on kerosene, and that was just the beginning. The next machine would pump water for our fields. One day, windmills would be our shield against hunger. That night, I was too excited to sleep. After everyone went to bed, I stayed awake and flipped through Explaining Physics, preparing for the next step.

Love this book. Check out his blog also. William is touring the US telling his story and he visited the famous Seattle Public Library.

Bryan and I presented at one of the coolest places so far on our tour: the Seattle Central Public Library. Just think, I started this entire journey in a small library in Wimbe Primary School that only had three shelves of books. So when I saw this place in Seattle, I nearly fell over. If a city puts this much energy and money into their public library, it’s a city for me.

Love this book. That is all.

I’m still uncomfortable at the rush to make everyone designers when we mostly understand design as styling, but Brown makes some great points and highlights things missing from many design thinking talks:

- design has been, and should be again, about big things

- design has its routes in system, systemic, or integrative thinking (it’s pulling together threads in addition to polishing the stone)

- design should start with humans.

The last I would amend on two fronts. First, design can start with technology (”what can I do with this nifty thing?”) so long as it gets grounded in human needs. I’m hoping Brown doesn’t mean it as an either/or but is overmessaging this part as a pendulum swing. Second, I might say instead that design should map back to human needs and be inspired by them. Starting with humans could force us into a habit of asking people what they want when they don’t know the possibilities.

Just re-read Martin Neuimeier’s A Designful Company along with a bunch of my co-workers. Reading a book at the same time as other people is a fantastic thing to do — it sets of neuronic chain reactions and builds common language — and the book itself was pretty good. However, it highlights one of the things that continues to bother me about our collective obsession with innovation.

Neumeier has a passage where he describes his “good/different” chart. It’s not rendered as a quad graph in the Kindle version of the book, but given that it involves two variables with 2 possible values, it practically screams for one:

Like any good quad graph, “up and to the right” is the sweet spot, or, as Neumeier put it “as you might have guessed, ‘good and different’ is the combination that produces home runs.” This bugs me. While I know marketing is all about the whitespace, the onlyness, the thing that no one else does, it seems like a distraction from the real issue: quality and betterness. Good and different could translate into Netflix and the Prius (examples Neumeier cites). But it could also translate into another rev of Microsoft Word that has yet another feature which not only doesn’t make it better, it actually makes it marginally worse because of the clutter and confusion. This would still be “good but different” (making it worse didn’t make it bad).

“Good but different”, as a construct misprioritizes and muddies people’s thinking. Good can very easily become good enough (the Microsoft example) and can cause people to rush to novelty or newness as the goal. Rather than focusing on being better/best, we pick the most obvious and lowest possible standard (who would actually argue on behalf of not good?).

Netflix is much better understood not as different (they used the mail), but as better than the current space. Yes, they used mail, but they did so in order to address the flaws of the video store model: availability of films, locational convenience, and perhaps most important, late fees. Prius is still actually a car, but it’s a better car, not a different one: it burns fuels more efficiently, it runs quieter. The point wasn’t to be as good as the past, with a difference, the goal was to solve problems with fossial fuels and internal combustion engines.

We should really throw out the notion of being different and focus on being good, better, then best. Not only does it avoid the rush to novelty, but it forces product creators (marketers, designers, engineers) to get customer- and user-centric in their thinking. It forces us to step back and ask first questions: what is good/ what would be better? is our belief that the status quo is good really accurate? is our understanding of the category (video distribution) correct?

Scott Berkun has a great post about why we should stop saying innovation, with the great line, which to me says it all: “Just be good. That’s hard enough. Most things made in the world suck. They really do.” This is a big cultural change for most places because an understanding of quality, of what is actually good is usually missing (or not shared or driven by individual tastes) and a conversation to understand what’s good requires time. Much easier to assume that what’s in front of you is plenty good and look for something that makes it stand out. But that’s the real lesson of the above examples, a focus on doing something better, on solving the pain points.

Stop talking about innovation, stop looking for points of differentiation, build a better ________ and people will beat the proverbial cliche to your hackneyed portal and you’ll be all win-win in the sweet spot of whatever quad graph you have.

The first 1:30 of the documentary Moog has a great line from Robert Moog, the inventor of the synthesizer and one of the parents of electronic music: “I can feel what’s going on inside of a piece of electronic equipment.” There are other passages in the movie (which has great tributes from electronic music performers such as Sun Ra, DJ Spooky, Mix Master Mike, Electric Skychurch and a wonderful animated title sequence), where he shows how visualizes the interactions of circuits and components. Interestingly, he also points out that his synthesizers are analog instruments, not digital ones and that he knows musicians approach the physicality of the electrical vibrations in the same way they approach violin, guitar, and piano strings.

Anyway, that close connection to material — which strikes me as a result of closely working and experimenting with them — as a source of inspiration, quality, and innovation is a theme near and dear to me. So, I clipped the movie and encourage would-be innovators and inventors to check it out. Moog the man is charming, engaged, lives a full life, and could be a more earth-bound person to learn from than Steve Jobs, Edison, and other lofty luminaries.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

PS One last reason to watch the movie is a Schaeffer beer commercial in which a 70s-mustachioed dude in polyester, riffs on the Moog for 20 seconds before the jingle (”Schaeffer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one.”) Worth the price of admission all by itself.

Ben Fry, creator of Processing (or Proce55ing for those that remember) and data viz guru at MIT, has an absolutely fascinating visualization of how Darwin changed the text of “The Evolution of Species” in the thirteen years following its publication.

The labels across the top are chapter numbers, the dashes underneath represent text from the book which you can see on mouse-over. The color bars indicate the different editions.

I called it fascinating on first look, but should probably be more measured or specific. I hate when we fail to distinguish between fact illustration (making a single thing visual) and data visualization (revealing previously unseen stories through a rich visual worth looking at several times). This falls somewhere in between. The final state of the chart, after the 6th, and lengthiest, revision does tell a story:

The most obvious part of the narrative is the addition of an entire section and extensive revisions to the final section in the 6th edition, indicating a structural bolstering of the argument and possibly responses to ten years of critique. The speckle patterns, small bits of color, show a lot of tinkering/revising in the first three editions. These all support Fry’s introductory point:

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime

I’m wondering, though, whether this illustration tells the story better than the text?

What does make it fascinating overall is the ability to mouse over the sections (the small gray and colored stripes) and read the text underneath. Might be a better tool (if the stripes were a little bit bigger and easier to mouse over) than it is a data viz.