My crusty old journalism instructor put it bluntly: "There's no such thing as good writing. Only good rewriting."
No matter how smoothly I composed the first draft of any article, my instructor would send it back to me for a rewrite. He didn't want any of us to fall prey to premature success. (I never saw that a serious threat.) But I have learned to appreciate his eye for first-draft failures and their value as essential ingredients for eventual success.
Planning isn't as valuable as learning. And learning comes from trying. And trying inevitably involves failures.
Recently my colleague Drew Dyck showed me a book he found, The Upside of Down. In it Megan McArdle writes about an experiment that showed the surprising benefits of failure. Peter Skillman, then head of "user experience" for Palm, the company that basically invented the handheld computer, conducted the experiment. He gathered small groups of different people—engineers, lawyers, business school students, even kindergarteners—and gave each group 20 pieces of uncooked spaghetti, a meter of tape, and a piece of string. The challenge: in 18 minutes to create the tallest freestanding structure that would support a marshmallow.
The results weren't all that surprising. The engineers generally beat the lawyers and MBAs (who spent too much time arguing about who should be in charge). But the group that did the best? (Surprise.) Kindergarten students.
Their designs didn't have the symmetry or the craftsmanship of the engineers' efforts, but the kindergarteners' towers did support marshmallows, and at a height that, on average, was a full inch taller than those of the engineers.
How did they do it? By not worrying about failure.
Skillman's analysis was worded a bit more precisely. He credited the kindergarteners' "experimentation" and "iteration." What actually happened was that they didn't make as many assumptions (only the kindergarteners, for instance, asked for more spaghetti as they broke it repeatedly in the construction process). And they didn't care how the structure looked. "They just dove in and started creating, discarding anything that didn't work … . By trying and failing, they learned what didn't work, which it turned out, was all the knowledge they needed to figure out what did."
As Skillman observed later, "Multiple iterations almost always beat single-minded focus around a single idea." Planning isn't as valuable as learning. And learning comes from trying. And trying inevitably involves initial failures. But from the less-than-stellar first attempts, eventual triumph emerges.
That story strikes home as our church experiments with ways to work with community groups to serve the homeless and under-resourced in our area. Our progress has come by trying and learning and not giving up but improving.
It also describes the painful stories we are publishing of pastors who've had to leave churches because of one sort of failure or another, but who've gained wisdom from those experiences and are better able to serve in the days ahead.
It describes the work of Bible translators who go round and round with speakers of various dialects to find words to communicate alien concepts. (How, for instance, do you describe "shepherd" or "lamb of God" to a tribe of islanders who know fish but have no concept of sheep?) It requires a variety of attempts and lots of interaction.
And it describes our efforts at Leadership Journal to continually develop new ways to resource church leaders—through events and social media and digital publications in addition to the print journal.
I guess we can be grateful for both success and … uh, iterations.
Marshall Shelley Editor
