It’s called the scientific method. Discovery results in creating hypotheses, testing them experimentally, failing, learning, and repeating the process wiser for the failure. Yes, getting something wrong is often a predicate for getting it right. In this sense, failure is a cornerstone of science and prelude to discovery.
Nobody wants failure in daily organizational life, of course. Nonetheless, it is inevitable. It all comes down to how you deal with failure in the moment and whether you use it to learn and apply its lessons. Failure can deliver useful lessons as long as people don’t sweep it under the rug or play the blame game by attacking and thereby silencing the parties deemed to have failed.
The terrific FT Weekend columnist Janan Ganesh recently wrote that, “There are such things as great wrong ideas,” failures that prove to be useful and lead to better outcomes. He points to Freud whose work has been discredited, revised, or abandoned in recent decades – or at least some of it. Freud’s non-representative and nonreproducible case studies were far more anecdotal than scientific, limiting if not debunking his work on the id, ego, superego, Oedipus Complex, and psychosexuality.
Ganesh asserts that, nonetheless, artists and authors have produced stunning achievements based on Freudian insights. “His emphasis on the inner life led to – or at least justified – the introspective turn that writers and painters took in the last century,” Ganesh wrote. He cites digressive, stream-of-consciousness novels and poetry as well as abstract expressionism as examples of the creative class building on the shoulders of a giant, even if that giant turned out to be wrong in some cases.
So too with Darwin, whose concepts of natural selection responded on the margins to Malthus’ wrongheaded warning that population growth would outstrip food production and create disaster. Ganesh paraphrases Darwin in that, “We get around the Malthusian trap by producing more output per person. Animals, unless they are planning to industrialize, can’t.”
Being wrong is a normal human occurrence, though it’s never right to be wrong morally or ethically and rarely so when lives are at stake. Being wrong in the physical and social sciences, however, can lead to being right - eventually. That's even if the people making the initial blunder are long gone.
