Fred Brooks On Failure And Design

Wired Magazine features an interview with Fred Brooks, author of Mythical Man-Month and The Design of Design.  My two favorite lines:

Brooks: You can learn more from failure than success. In failure you’re forced to find out what part did not work. But in success you can believe everything you did was great, when in fact some parts may not have worked at all. Failure forces you to face reality

....

Wired: You’re a Mac user. What have you learned from the design of Apple products?

Brooks: Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.

Read the whole thing. I just wish the interview were longer.

(via Kottke)

(photo: Jerry Markatos/University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Turn Failures Into Breakthroughs

Is that unexpected result a stupid mistake, or an expression of the truth?  Don't resist anomalous information because it might lead to an epiphany. Jonah Lehrer has the the following advice:

Check Your Assumptions: Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.

Seek Out the Ignorant: Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.

Encourage Diversity: If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.

Beware of Failure-Blindness: It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

Or as Stephen Covey might say, if things aren't working well, consider whether your paradigm is incomplete on incorrect.

(via Above and Beyond KM)