When errors aren’t wrong

If you’re looking for a loaded phrase to ponder, here’s a doozy: “trial and error.”

We don’t like the term “error,” but trial and error is, of course, a useful technique. If I ask you to calculate the square root of 300, for example, you’ll probably do it by trial and error, which is to say, by guessing. The “errors” aren’t errors at all, as long as they’re being intelligently used to guide subsequent guesses. It’s more “trial and refinement” than trial and error.

True, it’s unlikely that some deranged stranger will walk up to you and ask you about square roots. Anyone working in the tourism industry, however, faces a lot of trial and error anyway.

Buying advertising space in foreign tourism publications, for example, is often a shot in the dark. You never know what’s going to happen. If you’re averse to making “errors” in this realm, you’re not going to get very far. Hiding under your desk isn’t going to bring in the customers.

And even once the customers do arrive, it’s hard to know how they’ll react to the myriad details involved in serving them. I guess that’s one reason I like tourism; it’s a field that rewards constant tweaking and creativity. I never faced two days that were the same in tourism.

Indeed, the world is too messy to fit within the dry confines of a computer screen. I’m not diminishing the importance of calculation and number-crunching; I’m a total geek for that stuff. And I’m not suggesting that trial and error should be employed outside of reason. I’m saying, by contrast, that it can be done in accordance with reason.

Overall, when it comes to the evolution of industries, businesses, and a lot of other stuff, trial and error was certainly involved. Only in retrospect do these histories look clean and easily explained.

I’ll offer another example of trial and error: learning to swim.

If we wanted to take a theoretical approach to swimming, we could study fluid dynamics, read up on the theory of buoyancy, analyze various case studies about good swimmers, and diagram various techniques of swimming. After that, we could all jump into the deep end of a swimming pool and promptly drown.

In the real world, of course, we don’t need any theory or calculation in order to learn how to swim. The way we learn is by trial and error. Hopefully, we’ll cover the downside by having a teacher nearby and our first sessions in the shallow end; after all, an “error” is one thing, but a fatal error is quite another.

Don’t ask me how the body learns to swim at the physiological or psychological level, I have no idea, but it’s clearly a result of a lot of iterations of trial and error at an unconscious level. A fancier term might be a feedback loop.

We take trial and error for granted when we’re kids since it’s just the natural learning process. Nobody who I knew learned how to ride a bike, climb a tree, or throw a baseball by studying equations. We just went outside and figured it out.

Somehow, this instinct gets washed out of us as the years go by and as classroom lectures supplant hands-on engagement. In the classroom, an “error” will count against you on a test. The more errors, the worse the grade. Later on, in corporate settings, the same dynamic applies. Any savvy careerist will avoid taking any risks and thus avoid the corresponding prospect of getting blamed for an “error.” That’s why so many big companies become ungainly dinosaurs while small upstarts run circles around them. It’s not just a clash of scale. It’s a clash of cultures.

As a result, the tropics are full of refugees from corporate life who took chances to start dive shops, restaurants, tour companies, inns, and the like. They went back to the concept of tree-climbing, getting back to the hands-on engagement of life, accepting the notion of trial and error.

This brings us back to where we started, back to the term itself. The “error” in trial and error is too broad a term. It covers mistakes that might be reckless, fatal, or stupid, but it also covers useful feedback that’s part of the learning process, the creative process, or the business-development process.

Well, such are my thoughts on one of life’s most loaded phrases. Now if you’ll excuse me, I see that a couple of people are strolling by my beach chair. I’m going to quiz them on square roots.