Another fabulous and eminently sharable post! Thanks for committing to such clear prose. Makes me think of when Lisa Simpson electrified a cupcake to see how many times Bart would shock himself grabbing for it....and the beat goes on...
The history/learning distinction is the part that stayed with me. Past failures are raw material, not the lesson itself. Without something that processes the material, you just have a pile of receipts. The four propositions are essentially descriptions of the missing processor.
Worth adding: a lot of what we learn doesn't have to come from our own failures. Other people's mistakes are also material, if anyone is collecting them. The internet used to be much better at this — someone's personal blog with a quiet "mistakes I made setting this up" entry was infrastructure, even if it didn't call itself that. Some of that has thinned out. The implicit assumption now seems to be that someone, somewhere, must have written it down. Which is the same failure mode as "people remember," just on a larger scale.
On Proposition 2: in my experience, the unevenness isn't only about which level learns what. It's also about what happens to the lesson as it travels upward. The pattern looks something like this: "we had a serious problem with X" → "there were some issues with X" → "X went mostly fine" → "no problems." The information is filtered for palatability at every handoff. By the time it reaches the level that allocates budget for the next iteration, the lesson has been smoothed into "we're handling it." Failures also get hidden outright in some cases. Either way, what arrives at the strategic level is a polished version that no longer contains the texture the next team would need.
A closing thought: if you fail, fix it, and the same failure keeps showing up, the fix wasn't a fix. It was a performance of one. The mistake stops being a single event and becomes a standing condition. That seems to be what the Olympic data is showing on a slow loop.
i can agree that experience alone doesn’t quite capture the full scope of learning but i also know that there’s a ton of learning that can be gleaned from experience. both perspectives are true and both will require context to be established.
Another fabulous and eminently sharable post! Thanks for committing to such clear prose. Makes me think of when Lisa Simpson electrified a cupcake to see how many times Bart would shock himself grabbing for it....and the beat goes on...
Hahahaha!!! Thank you!
The history/learning distinction is the part that stayed with me. Past failures are raw material, not the lesson itself. Without something that processes the material, you just have a pile of receipts. The four propositions are essentially descriptions of the missing processor.
Worth adding: a lot of what we learn doesn't have to come from our own failures. Other people's mistakes are also material, if anyone is collecting them. The internet used to be much better at this — someone's personal blog with a quiet "mistakes I made setting this up" entry was infrastructure, even if it didn't call itself that. Some of that has thinned out. The implicit assumption now seems to be that someone, somewhere, must have written it down. Which is the same failure mode as "people remember," just on a larger scale.
On Proposition 2: in my experience, the unevenness isn't only about which level learns what. It's also about what happens to the lesson as it travels upward. The pattern looks something like this: "we had a serious problem with X" → "there were some issues with X" → "X went mostly fine" → "no problems." The information is filtered for palatability at every handoff. By the time it reaches the level that allocates budget for the next iteration, the lesson has been smoothed into "we're handling it." Failures also get hidden outright in some cases. Either way, what arrives at the strategic level is a polished version that no longer contains the texture the next team would need.
A closing thought: if you fail, fix it, and the same failure keeps showing up, the fix wasn't a fix. It was a performance of one. The mistake stops being a single event and becomes a standing condition. That seems to be what the Olympic data is showing on a slow loop.
i can agree that experience alone doesn’t quite capture the full scope of learning but i also know that there’s a ton of learning that can be gleaned from experience. both perspectives are true and both will require context to be established.
I agree with that.
this is loaded. a ton of information elucidated as statements and you might have to ponder on each to get the full lowdown.