Sloan Director Talks Being Wrong But Still Succeeding

MIT Sloan recently explored the new book from Innovation Teams Program Director Luis Perez-Breva, which attempts to teach readers that “being wrong [can] show a path to success.”

Perez-Breva explains, “When something is wrong, you know that with full certainty. Innovation is an outcome while innovating is the process.” He elaborates on the process of testing the veracity of an idea, “Either you’ll be wrong and find out about it, and so you fix it before you’ve spent an enormous amount of money, or, if the idea is stubbornly resistant to being proven wrong, then maybe there’s something to it.”

Perez-Breva believes astronauts perfectly exemplify the tactic of “running stories forward to ferret out the weaknesses in an idea.” Straight and to the point: “Astronauts try to determine everything that might get them killed [in order to] develop the tools to stay alive.”

He also points to Netflix as a key example of a company that layered upon their initial prototype to find innovation later on. “The DVD rental business was an essential way for Netflix to create revenue and learn, but it was the wrong organization for acquiring new consumers and growing. As an organization grows, some parts will be reorganized, some discarded, and what you end up with may have no obvious resemblance to the original organization. This is how being productively wrong can be brought up to scale.”

Perez-Breva concludes, “We all love to be right. But if we make it an operating principle to identify the ways that our ideas are wrong, we tend to learn more.”

regions: Boston

About the Author