Weekly Musings #4 Learning by trying and not succeeding, at least not at first.

This past week I posted my 404th "daily post" and when I was pondering what to write I realized that 404 is the number that you see when entering a web address to a non-existent or broken web page, and that got me thinking about error codes.

And with that I don't mean the pop-up dialogues that tell you you've done something wrong, I meant it more figuratively in daily life, at our workplaces or in our relationships.

I also spent some time reading about errors, and how we react to them. Jane Metcalf wrote a very interesting paper about human errors and learning from errors, where she argues that "it may be worthwhile to allow and even encourage students to commit and correct errors while they are in low-stakes learning situations rather than to assiduously avoid errors at all costs."

I find this fascinating, especially since school is usually accused of the opposite, of creating what we call the Right Answer Syndrome. And that's not just a school problem, I'd say most large corporations are even worse. What is the Right Answer Syndrome you wonder? It's simple, it's when you are more concerned about answering the "right" answer according to what you think your teacher or boss wants to hear, than you are in actually solving the problem in front of you. All your thoughts are "what do I think they want me to answer", instead of "Let's see, I wonder how one could solve this problem in a new way that no one has ever thought about before".

But back to the Metcalfe paper, one thing that stood out was the fact that we learn more from making mistakes and correcting them, than we do from guessing and getting it right the first time. But why is that so?

That got me thinking about how we react to errors, which emotions and chemical reactions control what happens in our body when we make an error?

So I found another paper, or at least a blog post describing a paper, Learning from mistakes, in which they describe an electrical impulse called ERN (error-related negativity) that fires in our brain when we make, or think we have made, a mistake.

It's like a small electrical shock we give ourselves when we pick the wrong choices, and it's meant to be uncomfortable so we don't make the same mistake again.

And even though people with strong ERN signals tend to get better grades, it's also associated with anxiety and stress; having staff or students that become physically uncomfortable when making mistakes doesn't make for a very creative bunch.

The picture I picked to represent this musing is from 2015 when I was marketing the ice cream LOHILO, a brand I developed in 2013-14. That journey was full of trials and lots of errors, guesses and mistakes and finally successes. But it didn't come easy.

I think what made it work was our mindset. We knew that when we started, we were trying to create something that was considered near impossible (ice cream without or with very low levels of sugar or fat) and that no-one had really managed to do before, and we also knew that we wouldn't get it right from the start. So when we wrote our vision and mission statements and when we talked amongst ourselves, we made sure have the mindset that we were constantly striving to do better every time we tried, to be curious and keep trying to get it right.

As the saying goes, "It's not about being right, it's about trying to get it right".

I think it is crucial that you foster a culture of exploration and curiosity in any organization, and if nothing else do it because time passes, and as time goes by, the world changes.

You need to encourage people, not to make mistakes, but to make attempts, again and again, until one of the attempts succeeds to reach whatever goal you are aiming for.

#trialanderror #learningbydoing #errors