I Screw Up. I believe in failure. I believe in taking an intellectual risk and falling flat on my face. I believe in taking something apart in order to learn how to put it back together the right way through a process of putting it back together the wrong way first. I believe in failing by doing something you shouldn’t have and learning the hard way why you shouldn’t have done it. I failed today. I did the wrong thing and had it go as badly as it possibly could have. Even so, it may have been the best thing I’ve ever done in my continuingly evolving struggle to connect with my 8th grade social studies class. My school, like the rest of the schools of the New York City Department of Education, has an ironclad rule against students using personal electronic devices like games and cell phones no matter how smart they are.
Please don’t respond to this post with information on how the computers students all carry in their pockets can be utilized in the classroom. So here’s what happened. Silence. “Wow.” Sunk Costs. Many of my mistakes can be traced back to a failure to recognize and appreciate “sunk cost.” The term comes from economics: “Sunk Cost” is money you’ve already spent and cannot get back no matter what. A “rational actor,” as economists say, will completely ignore sunk costs when making decisions because the money is gone no matter what action is taken next.
Of course we carbon-based life forms can rarely be described as “rational,” especially when it comes to ignoring sunk costs. It’s hard to abandon projects in which you’ve poured time and money, especially when you’ve also attached your ego and reputation. Sometimes it’s easy to do the right thing. For example, let’s say you designed a banner ad for a certain website (cost: $1000) and paid to run the ad for three months (cost: $2000). Clearly you won’t spend any more time or money on that ad. And yet, throwing good money after bad is exactly what we do in many other situations. Of course the correct decision probably won’t be made. Ris, Innovation and Values. This page has been archived. Archived Content Information identified as archived on the Web is for reference, research or recordkeeping purposes. It has not been altered or updated after the date of archiving.
Web pages that are archived on the Web are not subject to the Government of Canada Web Standards. Summary of Main Points 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Adopt an overall risk management regime that helps managers progress from seeing risk as a danger to be avoided to seeing risk as a necessity to be managed, with a corresponding progression for innovation and values. Introduction This paper discusses the tension between risk taking and innovation, and the impact of values and organizational culture on both. The paper deals with five different types of innovation. Innovation The research literature is not unanimous in defining the concept of innovation. The generally accepted answer is that innovation is different from creativity. You can buy almost everything today.
Five views of innovation. Learning Through Failure - Getting Unstuck. "Spectacular failure is better than moderate success. " - Faste, Stanford Dept Mechanical Engineering How many of us can say this after a spectacular failure? For those whose jobs day-to-day innovation, this often is one of their secrets of success. One of the books I'm reading now is To Engineer is Human. It doesn't take long to get Petroski's message - failure is involved in any successful design. The problem is, we often don't hear about failures - and the problem is more severe in schools. One of the most pernicious things about hiding failure for students is that it discourages healthy risk-taking and can have profound intellectual and creative stunting consequences in adulthood.
Resilience and optimism may not come easy for some kids, so it's important to know how to encourage in a way that is credible but also constructive. Technorati Tags: learning, motivation, engineering, creativity, innovation, mistakes, education, perfectionism, gifted, entrepreneurship, optimism, EQ.