There’s a new podcast from Harvard Business School called the HBR IdeaCast (also on iTunes) that spends 20 minutes interviewing editors and authors about new articles in the Harvard Business Review and new articles from HBS Press. The discussion of “The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes†referred to DARPA’s Grand Challenge to build an autonomous ground vehicle as a great example of a deliberate mistake. In the first year of the contest, none of the vehicles were able to complete the course. By the second year, five vehicles successfully negotiated the 130 mile course. For a $1 million annual investment, DARPA not only got the brightest engineers in the country working on the same problem, but it also got a look at dozens of new technologies and was able to see how they operated in the field. What a deal.
When the potential gain greatly outweighs the cost of the experiment, as in this case, a deliberate mistake is worth making, according to the HBR authors. Deliberate mistakes can be set up to challenge assumptions about customers and processes. They can lead to insights that could save time and money. The podcast includes a list of five ways to tell if use of a deliberate mistake is worth making. Take a listen. It could be the small investment in time that really pays off.
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