email us at amarts@artifact3.com

Name: Amin Marts. No worries if you mispronounce the first name, I’ll correct you.

What I’m interested in: Simply, finding solutions for problems, excuse me, challenges.

What I bring to the table: Big picture thinking. Ruthless execution. The ability to distill complex topics into bite-sized and easy to digest contextual stories.

Turn On’s: Smart design. Simple solutions to complex problems. Billboards that make me stop, think, and take a picture to share with you. Jargon. Most of all, flowy singletrack.

Turn Off’s: Jargon. Overly complex solutions that don’t scale. Ambiguous messages. Unintelligible handwriting. Skiers who wear Starter jackets.

My Favorite Tools: iPad, Keynote, Mindmeister, DropBox, old skool whiteboards, OmniFocus, Glenn Beck.

Things I (admit) I read: HBR, Economist, anything Seth Godin writes, WSJ, on occasion the International Herald, when feeling snarky The New Yorker.

January’s Wish: To lose the twang I’ve developed from watching too much CMT during Christmas.

Best way to contact me: Through my twitter or email. I’m easy to find.

The Art of Failing

Failure is a dirty word. It’s the elephant in the room that everyone sees but no one wants to acknowledge. Sir James Dyson considers it a natural component of problem solving. Donna Fenn thinks of it as a vital aspect of American entrepreneurialism. Honda reveres it as the secret sauce of success. I see aspects of the art of failing in learning.

Understanding and success (for the persistent) are the yield of failure. Don’t believe me? Watch as a child learns to walk or ride a bike. Each misstep, each time they topple over, is another opportunity to figure out the wrong and right way of doing it. The sum of these experiences is success.

Learning how to deploy and maintain a software platform or application is no different. The basics are critical but understanding the how and why is what separates adequate administrators from rock-star administrators, who are cool under fire.

The fundamental difference between the two groups is, the rock-stars treat failure as an opportunity to learn. Each failure builds support for techniques that work and understanding around techniques that don’t. To no surprise, this makes them more knowledgeable about the systems they administer and ultimately more valuable to the organizations to which they belong.

Not all environments are forgiving enough to promote, allow or even believe in the art of failing. Likewise, if it’s unacceptable to fail in real life for the sake of learning where is failing ok? It’s ok in the classroom.

Technical courses have become the perfect sandbox environment for administrators to hone their skills. Tools made popular by VMware allow instructional designers to build courses and take snapshots of the classroom environment at various stages of the course. Snapshots enable students to attempt multiple fixes to a problem to ascertain which one works best, or if they know better than the instructor. If they completely break the environment or realize a proposed fix simply won’t work, they can open a snapshot from earlier part in the course. The benefit to the student is the ability to fail safely from multiple perspectives, multiple times without the pressure of a customer watching, a supervisor critiquing or missing a SLA.

Posted by on 05.27.2010 at 6:35am   Tags: , , , , , ,
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One Response to “The Art of Failing”

  1. Jennifer Black says:
    May 27, 2010 at 8:45 am

    The cover story of Wired magazine from January 2010 addresses this same topic. It’s called “How to Fail: Why Losing Big Can be a Winning Strategy” and covers everything from neuroscience to video games to Alex Baldwin. Check it out at http://www.wired.com/magazine/18-01.

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