Tom Peters has quoted Dee Hock (founder and former CEO of the VISA association) for a long time who once said, "The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your minds, but how to get the old ones out."
New brain science points to this statement's truth. Mark Histed, Anitha Pasupathy, and Earl Miller demonstrated in a study published in Neuron that when it comes to learning, success sticks with us, but failure does not. Failure, perhaps, is as immediately tossed out, as success is immediately stored. Once stored, success biases us towards what was successful. The researcher's suggest their findings may help us understand how to link reward to trial and error when learning (although I it seems apparent from their paper "learning" means learning a known useful skill, not necessarily "learning" writ large).
In the January-February, 2010 issue of HBR, Scott Berinato wrote about this study. He quotes Miller' caution on connecting this research project's results to the workplace in too concrete a manner. Miller suggests since our brain knows how to learn from success, perhaps we should pay more attention to how we fail.
One of the best ways to get outside our own success trap might be to learn from others' success. Which leads me to another Dee Hock quote:
"It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom."
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