Indeed, many innovations have as their root source some form of just doing it —giving something a try, experimenting, just to see if it will work. Returning to the example of the 3M Post-it Notes, Spencer Silver described the original genesis of the adhesive:

The key to the Post-it adhesive was doing the experiment. If I had sat down and thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. If I had really seriously cracked the books and gone through the literature, I would have stopped. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.

People like myself get excited about looking for new properties in materials. I find that very satisfying, to perturb the structure slightly and just see what happens. I have a hard time talking people into doing that. It’s been my experience that people are reluctant to just try, to experiment —just to see what will happen.

She was right. If Albert were to get a rude shock next month, he’d have three possible explanations for what happened, none of which are good.

1. The review isn’t fair. If things really were so dire, why hasn’t this come up until now? This must be a mistake.

2. The review is fair, but my manager was negligent and didn’t realize I was underperforming until the end of the half.

3. The review is fair, but my manager wasn’t honest in sharing feedback with me along the way, so I didn’t have a chance to improve.

I was at risk of falling into bucket three. Luckily, I still had time to put the lesson into action. The sooner that Albert internalized he was not meeting expectations, the quicker he could potentially turn things around, and the smoother our future performance conversations would go.

But it was Stewart Resnick who helped me see another even more important fact about the silver machine—that its advantage, though real, wasn’t interesting.

The silver machine’s advantage gives it value, but the advantage isn’t interesting because there is no way for an owner to engineer an increase in its value. The machine cannot be made more efficient.

Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach concluded that unawareness of failures’ useful information made learning from failure difficult. So they designed an experiment in which participants were helped to identify the useful information in their failures, and this made them more likely to share them.

After more usability test runs within the company—pallets of the pads that were set out in the halls quickly emptied!—3M was finally convinced to launch an intensive marketing campaign in 1980. The rest, as they say, is history.