Scott Berkun has once again spewed forth gold in the form of his blog postings.

I’m a fan of things going wrong. It’s only when things go wrong that anyone pays attention enough to really learn something, or get the courage to try something new.

Followed shortly there after by this:

An easy metric of innovation culture is learning – are people at all levels learning, sharing and growing from whatever happens, good or bad. Not lip-service. But actual learning, where people admit their own mistakes or oversights and what they themselves might have done differently (rather than the witch-hunt many big companies confuse with learning).

As an employee of a company who has recenty hired a new CTO and CIO and has been repeating the word “innovate” like it was gold, this strikes very close to home. Often times the managers, who on their own are self-serving salary-hunters and nothing more, see a mistake and immediately go into what is openly referred to in my workplace as “CYA”, or Cover Your Ass. Whereas a better idea migh be to look at the environment their own behavior has created and learning that maybe things need to be done differently.

It isn’t groundbreaking news for me to say that people perform better when doing something they enjoy. What might be groundbreaking, on the other hand, is the idea that just because one does something they enjoy doesn’t mean they’re any good at it. It is very possible, and arguably common, for one to perform a function they love and be atrocious at it. Think failed athletics careers for an easy example.

I think my idea creates a pretty neat situation. If you’re not any good at what you love, what are you good at? There are training classes available to make you better at performing a task but where do you to learn to love something else? I’m certain that the concept that you will love something when you get better at it is flawed, but I know the idea that some people are just doomed to being miserable failures is wrong. What do you think?

Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.

– Peter Drucker

Scott Berkun is one of my favorite blog writers I’ve encountered. Today he provided me with a couple of quotes that are extremely relevant to my workplace.

We get so used to trying to dispatch questions quickly (and ideas often ride the backs of good questions) we forget the most important part of a question – the part where you stop and think before you answer.

…

I used to respect people who were masters of the quick answer. But as I get older it seems the masters of quick answers are often just masters of facts. Trivia. Other people’s theories. Now I think when it comes to matters of importance, these are people to fear. I agree there is definitely a time for fast thinking, but when I look around it seems slow thinking is the path to many of the things we claim we want.

Often, in my workplace, a question is asked, a quick response is given, and because, presumably, the answer was so quickly given it accumulates nods of approval within seconds. This is exacerbated when the quick response includes the latest industry buzzwords or some obscure technology that is arguably better suited to a lab environment. But since the response included these things, most of which folks truly don’t understand past the marketing release, it must be a good idea. I can imagine the question some of these people are asking themselves before beginning their nod and approve process. “Well, he knows how *technology j* works better than I do so it must be a really good solution, I guess?”

I’ve been in my field long enough now, 16 years and a few months, to be able to acknowledge that at least half of my snap reactions to design questions have been wrong in my career. I’d be willing to place a bet that 99.9% of my reactions ended up achieving the goal at hand, but upon looking back there was surely a simpler, more scalable approach to the question. I believe that is the crutch that quick answers lean on. Something might work. It might get things from point A to point B. But it also might be the equivalent of taking a flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles that connects in Dallas. Sure you get there, but was it really the best, the right, way?