Being Productively Wrong
Being Productively Wrong
At its genesis, no thing about an eventual innovation is new. It is only in hindsight that the stories of innovations become streamlined, linear accounts of success. Actual innovating, like learning, is a highly nonlinear process. To get started, all you need is a hunch about a real-world problem; a set of parts and access to a community of people to render the problem tangible; a strategy to engage in trial and error; and an appetite to learn by being productively wrong first. You learn about the problem as you bring together those people and parts. At the beginning, there is an abundance of paths forward and no “best” path is defined. The path is full of choices, not formulas, and there are many potential outcomes.
Keywords: Innovating, Learning, Real-world problems, Forward thinking, The curse of hindsight, Productively wrong, Paradoxes
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