If how much you learn is directly correlated to how much you fail, how do organizations crack the science behind using failure to their advantage?

Pascal Finette is the co-founder of Radical, an advisory firm that helps organizations turn disruption into competitive advantage. He’s also the author of several books including, Disrupt Disruption: How to Decode the Future, Disrupt Your Industry, and Transform Your Business and OUTLEARN: The Art of Learning Faster Than the World Can Change.

In this episode, Pascal shares with Greg the lessons he picked up working for Mozilla, reframing failure as the “first attempt in learning,” the importance of psychological safety in the workplace, and what organizations can do to make learning cheap and fast.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Why assumptions fall apart

06:11: The challenge I have is that we build so much of our lives and our products and services we design on assumptions. And because we feel like it is too hard to test these assumptions, we just bake them in as factual knowledge. And then, once they hit reality, they do not survive the contact with reality, and they fall apart. So, it behooves us to figure out what our assumptions are and figure out a way to test those assumptions the quickest, cheapest, easiest way.

The formula for faster learning

07:55: The core formula in this book, ‘Outlearn,’ is very simple. It's the speed of learning is inversely proportional to the cost of failure. So make learning cheap, and you learn faster. To do that, and I think that is the big part, is you need to figure out what you are actually testing and break it down into smaller components.

On focusing on learning, not failure

11:17: Language is really important, and I think there is this piece where you want to slow down a tiny bit and just think about, "What did we learn?" instead of the failing part. Because learning anchors stuff in your prefrontal cortex, the creative part of your brain.

Recommended Resources:

• Firefox
• Amy Edmondson
• Obi Felten
• Pandora (service)
• Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary by Geoffrey Cain
• Dashun Wang, Google Scholar

Guest Profile:

• Staff Profile at radical
• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn

Guest Work:

• Disrupt Disruption: How to Decode the Future, Disrupt Your Industry, and Transform Your Business
• OUTLEARN: The Art of Learning Faster Than the World Can Change
• 960: A short book about the time you have left

If you enjoyed this show, here are some other unSILOed episodes you may like:

• How To Fail The Right Way with Amy Edmondson

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Even without the attention-consuming technology we’re immersed in today, humans have always been easily distractible. So what distracted the mindful monks of the past? And are there lessons from the monks’ practice that we can apply to today’s level of distraction?

Jamie Kreiner is a history professor at UCLA and the author of The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction. In the book, she details the strategies monks used to improve concentration and connects the past to the present – examining why the human mind has persistently been prone to wandering.

Jamie and Greg discuss monks’ theories of distractibility and why concentration mattered for salvation, ethical obligation, and getting beyond self-fixation. The conversation also contrasts monastic aims with Stoicism and Buddhist mindfulness, and considers what modern people can learn from the monastic approach.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

How monks managed distractions internally

23:02: This is a really basic but really profoundly smart way that monks tackled having thoughts they did not want to have. So rather than kind of ignoring them or hoping they are not real or just not paying attention at all and letting something fester and get bigger, you sort of act as a bouncer or a screener of anything that comes through, and you have to evaluate with each one, "Do I want this here? Is this a good thing?" And sometimes that can be really hard. Sometimes they thought that work of deciding whether something was good or bad was so difficult you actually needed to consult another person about it, like a mentor. We would think of it maybe as a therapist now, but they had a very different idea of what that kind of mentoring involved.

Books like technology can be distracting too

29:40: Books are really essential to that initial process of learning, meditating, and internalizing, and part of the memory training involves interacting with books in these ways. But it was also, like any piece of tech, distracting on its own.

How monks strengthened attention over time

26:59: Probably the most basic difference is that they just treated the memory like we would treat a muscle or something. It needed exercise, it needed training. You had to keep it in good shape if you wanted it to behave properly. So the memory for them was both a storage unit, but also a kind of construction site or toolkit that could work with the memories. It had to be a kind of exploratory place to build new ideas out of. So you would train the memory in two different ways. One was training it to store things that you actually wanted to retrieve. They knew it was really hard to get rid of memories, but if you kept stocking new ones that mattered or kept revisiting the ones that you thought were most important, that would more effectively, over time, edge out the things that you thought were intrusive.

Recommended Resources:

• Stoicism
• Akrasia
• Monasticism

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at UCLA
• Google Scholar Profile

Guest Work:

• The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction
• Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West

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