Again, I have selected some excerpts from the book which I find useful especially when things don't seem to be going to plan. It is good to remind ourselves that experiencing failure is part of the "joy" of life and to remind ourselves to move forward with the lesson/experience gained. Words in blue are my own opinion.
1) To survive and be profitable it is not enough to be good; you must be one of the best. (This is especially true in the age of the internet where information is readily available including your company's track records, customer satisfaction, etc.)
2) In a complex, changeable world, the process of trial and error is essential. (The point here is that the world is getting more complex and we cannot wait for the ideal solution, if ideal solution can be devised in the first place.)
3) But whether we like it or not, trial and error is tremendously powerful process for solving problems in a complex world, while expert leadership is not. (As a leader, our role is to guide our people towards a process of solving problems and not providing direct solution where the direct solution may be completely wrong! As a follower, we should not also expect our leader to provide the solution but we should devise a process towards solving the problem with the leader stepping in whenever the process is veering off its course.)
4) The great economic psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised the behaviour in their classic analysis of the psychology of risk: 'a person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise'. (Some of us may have experienced this first hand before. I think the most common place where we can observe this behaviour is in a casino. For example, we have loss considerable money and we tend to place one last bet of the same amount that we have loss with the hope of recouping our money. This happens because we have not accepted the loss and we ended taking huge gambles which we would not have taken in other circumstances.)
5) The economist Terrance Odean has found that we tend to hang on grimly, and wrongly, to shares that have plunged in the hope that things will turn around. We are far happier to sell shares that have been doing well. Unfortunately, selling winners and holding on to losers has in retrospect been poor investment strategy.
6) Faced with a mistake or a loss, the right response is to acknowledge the setback and change direction. Yet our instinctive reaction is denial. That is why 'learn from your mistakes' is wise advice that is painfully hard to take.
7) ...... recipe for successfully adapting. The three essential steps are: to try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; to make failure survivable, because it will be common; and to make sure that you know when you've failed.
8) ..... organisations which ignore internal criticism soon make dreadful errors.......
9) ..... bright ideas emerge from the swirling mix of other ideas, not from isolated minds.
10) But once a new idea has appeared, it needs the breathing space to mature and develop so that it is not absorbed and crushed by conventional wisdom.
11) And in the quest for truly original research, some failure is inevitable. (This not only applies to research. To create a responsive and dynamic organisation, it is important that the management accepts that some failure is inevitable and what is important is how we learn from the failure and move on. If the organisation do not expect failure at all, it will paralyse its own people as no one would dare to try new things which benefit the company or make important decisions and the company will end up with the motto: "The less we do, the better as there will be less chance of a failure". After all, the best way to avoid failure is to do nothing.)
12) Correlation is a treacherous guide to causation. (Don't rely on correlations too much!!!)
13) In a lecture of 1755, Adam Smith declared that 'little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural order of things.' In other words, if the government can just get the basics right, everything else will gradually follow in time, and foreign aid can help - if only it is properly tested. (I would think that the same principle applies to a company. If a company or its management manage to get the basics right, i.e. condusive working environment for employees to thrive and contribute, clear reward system and a system of check and balance, the organisation will probably take off on its own. What do you think?)
14) ..... three different types of error. The most straightforward are slips, when through clumsiness or lack of attention you do something simply didn't mean to do.
15) ..... violations, which involve someone deliberately doing the wrong thing.
16) Most insidious are mistakes. Mistakes are things you do on purpose, but with unintended consequences, because your mental model of the world is wrong. (This reminds us of the famous statement by General Von Manstein on the German Officer Corps:
There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm......Second, there are the hard working intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.
I guess General Von Manstein also realise that the most insidious of errors are mistakes and hard working but stupid people tends to do the most mistakes. This is just to put the message across in a direct manner but for me, hard working is an important trait which I value the most. This is because there is no way for us to know whether we are stupid or intelligent as some good decisions are probably due to luck. Anyway, if we are hard working, we can certainly fulfill our own potential and if we are lazy, no amount of talent in the world will make us successful.)
17) There are three essential steps to using the principles of adapting in business and everyday life, and they are in essence the Palchinsky principles. First, try new things, expecting that some will fail. Second, make failure survivable: create safe spaces for failure or move forward in small steps. As we saw with banks and cities, the trick here is finding the right scale in which to experiment: significant enough to make a difference, but not such a gamble that you're ruined if it fails. And third, make sure you know when you've failed, or you will never learn. As we shall see in the next chapter, this last one is especially difficult when it comes to adapting in our own lives.
18) Being willing to fail is the essential first step to applying the ideas of Adapt in everyday life.
19) ..... three obstacles to heeding that old advice, 'learn from your mistakes': denial, because we cannot separate our error from sense of self-worth; self-destructive behaviour, because like the game-show contestant Frank, or Twyla Tharp when marrying Bob Huot, we compound our losses by trying to compensate for them; and the rose-tinted processes outlined by Daniel Gilbert and Richard Thaler, whereby we remember past mistakes as though they were triumphs, or mash together our failures with our successes.
20) The ability to adapt requires this sense of security, an inner confidence that the cost of failure is a cost we will be able to bear. Sometimes that takes real courage; at other times all that is needed is the happy self-delusion of a lost three-year-old. Whatever its source, we need that willingness to risk failure. Without it, we will never truly succeed. (Fortune favours the bold?)
In summary, this book reminds me to be brave and to try new things, adapt and move on. Which one do you think is better? To have tried, failed and try again or to live in regrets that you have never tried and you can only wonder, what if? I think most of us know the answer to that question.
'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better' - Samuel Beckett.
