Early failure is beneficial.

hiroki_daichi: Principles such as Agile have become difficult to understand when they are explained in terms of “speed and agility” because of the meaning of those words. The key principle in software development is “Fail-Fast”, and the principle of static typing, automated testing, chaos engineering, scrum development, and product management is “fail early”.

nishio: “Trying new things can lead to failure” “Failure is an opportunity to learn and is beneficial.” From these two points, we can derive that “doing something fast that will not fail will only make you do a lot of things that are not new, but you will not learn anything”. It’s obvious, but it’s hard to get this across to people who are convinced that “failure is bad.

nishio: Even if we tell people that “failure is not evil, but rather beneficial” as an obvious fact, they will not be able to adapt to the new interpretation, saying “I’m saying this as a consolation to those who have failed, and of course it is better not to fail. It is better not to fail, right?” and they cannot adapt to the new interpretation. This is the kind of trap we fall into when we take unwritten intentions into our own hands.

nishio: my own learning is hindered by the “intentions” I have created on my own.

• Related to [Why not self-mutilation? Assumptions that others speak up to take care of their feelings Image of dialogue

hrjn: I agree that there are lessons to be learned in failure, but success should provide more valid insights. I think the basics are better if you are doing things fast that don’t fail, though I assume you are doing things that are worth doing in the first place. For example, when learning from history. twitter.com/nishio/status/…

• hrjn: I think we are basically talking about having meaningful achievement goals and how to approach those achievement goals. We think about maximizing returns while reducing risk within a given set of resources, but I was wondering if it’s a question of which resources are more expensive: resources lost through failure or resources learned from history.

• hrjn: I think it is easier to learn from failure as a way of working, because the situation at hand has some unique background, and even if you learn from history, you can’t apply it as it is, and it is usually faster to do it. In most cases, it is faster to just do it.

• hrjn: It is easier to understand history if you do it and then look back at the history after you understand what is in it. If you try to do it exhaustively from the beginning, you will usually end up not understanding it well or missing a lot, so I don’t recommend it.

nishio: In the first half, the condition was “If you try something new -” so the conclusion should have been “You can’t learn ‘about new things’ by doing things fast enough that you don’t fail. The fool learns from experience, the wise learns from experience, the wise learns from experience. The fool learns from experience, the wise learn from history.

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