We recently hosted an interesting evening of presentations in the 20×20 PechaKucha format, all on the topic of failure. We had about a dozen speakers, talking about everything from personal failings to systemic failure, to start up failure to managing the risk of failure. I took careful notes on what I was hearing, on the basis of which I’ve compiled this here list of nine key learnings:

1. Personal failure is never easy to talk about.

2. Failure is only a possibility for heroes, not for innocent by-standers.

3. Failure is the process of learning that the world is other than we thought.

4. Entrepreneurs have begun using failure as a cheap badge of honor.

5. That which we cannot walk away from dogs us as our failure. Walk away.

6. In India, any deviation from the norm is labelled failure.

7. Even should we choose not to look at it, failure is continuous and all around us.

8. The concept of failure must be unlearned. By each of us individually and then by all of us collectively.

9. Innovation is the discipline of mapping, tracking and systematically overcoming failure.

Not all of this is self-evident and obvious, so I’ll soon be working on some notes to explain each point.

I met a young guy yesterday, whose story has preoccupied me a bit. He came for one of our workshops, and stopped by to talk afterwards. He told me he has always had an affinity for biology and biological systems, that he has studies insects and plants, and the biochemistry of how they interact with us humans. He has found, however, that there are no job prospects for someone with those interests, so he was told by his family to study for a Bachelors of Commerce. He doesn’t do well in it, because he’s really averse to maths. He’s also doing cost accounting on the side, which he’s also bad at, because he doesn’t do well with the maths. He draws, makes cartoons, builds things. Those are the things he’s interested in, but he doesn’t see how to build a career that way. What should he do?

It occurred to me that this guy would be a great intern or assistant for someone working in biodesign, or in urban farming, or in any of these new areas of playing with biological systems in ways that are actually of value and use to us humans. I know quite a few folks doing this stuff in SFO, Helsinki, Rotterdam, Paris. But not so many here in India.

I suggested he look out for a Master’s program in design here in India. But honestly, I’m not sure how they would look at a kid with a B.Com. degree. Nor am I sure that a design program will actually nurture his interest and sensibility with respect to veriditas. So I’m open to ideas. What should he do?

We just concluded the first of a series of workshops we have planned, on building professional skills in young people. We had a clutch of parents, a bunch of students and young professionals, even an industry hand from the field of H.R. We talked about the Indian education system, about how it disables real learning from happening, about the skills crisis in India, and what parents and students could do to prepare themselves for a successful and rewarding career.

By and large, everyone seems to agree that our educational system is broken and in a bad way. But how and where can change come in, when there are so many powerful players invested in keeping it broken? We talked a bit about how to build skills through learning by doing, when it struck me that learning by doing is in itself a powerful and unheralded definition of innovation.

It’s hard to convey that sense of a fit between something held in your right hand with something in your left hand. You didn’t think they belonged together, but they do, and they were already always in your two hands. That’s the kind of odd sense I have with this insight: To be aware of what you are doing to the point where you can learn from it and do it slightly better or different each time, this is also a definition of innovation. Not every kind of innovation works this way, perhaps, not radical business model innovation, nor disruptions to conventional ways of working, but certainly many incremental components of internal and process innovation operate this way. To be able to learn something new by doing something you are already doing, is also to be capable of innovation.

I just thought I’d share that.

The other day I had to leave work after lunch to run an errand for the family. I walked around Lajpat Nagar not finding what I was looking for, but I could suddenly see something really clearly… I called my colleague up back at work, and described in detail a diagram or flow chart of how different kinds of companies might be connected to the Adianta School and how they might move from one stage to the next along a kind of path. This diagram made much of the process we were struggling with a kind of simple visual poetry. And it came to me amidst the mess and bustle of the fabric markets of Lajpat Nagar.

This morning, before work, I was swimming with the kid, in a cold pool made warm by the stinging sun. I wasn’t thinking about it much, but later in the day, when I was talking to people about social media and CKS marketing activities, my muscles ached a bit that reminded me of the pool in the morning. It seemed to trigger a flow state where I described a process through which we could build a series of micro-campaigns every week to reach out to different types of clients, merging our social media efforts with our marketing activities in a tight coordinated formation. Maybe it will even work. At least it got the people around me to smile and share a certain rhythm of possibility.

My point with both of these cases is that often one has to look away. In fact, the more I look away, the more things seem to happen upstairs that really need to happen.

The New Yorker has reposted its earlier piece on Peter Thiel, the well known philosopher-entrepreneur-investor of Silicon Valley. It’s really an extraordinary account, by the great George Packer, of Thiel’s politics, worldview, and how they align to disrupt higher education. I’m sorry I missed it when it first came out.

I must confess to feeling many simultaneous tugs of alignment, inspiration and revulsion in this account, given our own efforts to disrupt Indian education. There is much more to say, and I’m only part way through the piece, but what strikes me most is that the Indian system is corrupt, dysfunctional and scarce, while the American system is merely elitist. Therefore, when Peter and I launch into these different systems, we are tearing at different windmills, with different demons in our sight. Our vision, I hope, is inclusive, egalitarian, pragmatic, and scalable. Peter’s? I have more to read and report soon, I think.