Wrong Way, Right Direction

You’re a deep-sea treasure hunter. You make your living by studying centuries-old reports of ships lost at sea, trying to locate a wreck to pillage. 

It’s a costly, risky business. But if you find one, the trove might be worth millions. 

But you can’t search a whole region of the ocean all at once (oceans are, after all, quite large). So you break the region into smaller areas and, based on the records, assign a probability that estimates the odds of finding wreckage in that area. For example:

• Area A: 80% probability
• Area B: 15% probability
• Area C: 5% probability 

Off to Area A you go. An expensive exhibition with a big team. 

(This isn’t made up. People really do this).

Alas, no ship, no treasure, no dice. Not this time. All that trouble for nothing. 

Might as well give up, right? Your best option, the 80% bet, failed. All you’re left with are two sad options:

• Area B: 15% probability
• Area C: 5% probability 

Except that’s not quite right.

Since you confirmed the wreckage wasn’t in Area A, the probabilities of the other two options update:

• Area B: 75% probability
• Area C: 25% probability 

Next round, you try Area B. No ship. What now? Quit? Of course not. Because the probabilities update again. Since the wreckage wasn’t in Area A or Area B, you’ve got one option left, and it’s a damn good one:

• Area C: 100% probability 

Provided your initial mental model isn’t horribly divorced from reality, the more you fail, the closer you get to succeeding. 

This is the one reason resilient people, resilient companies, and resilient cultures succeed. They turn time into an ally by building the expectation of failure into their blueprint. That way, when they fail, as we all do, that failure doesn’t send them back to square one. It becomes data that updates the map and sets course for more promising waters.