Eddie Obeng: Smart failure for a fast-changing world

Eddie Obeng is a business educator. He was once a teacher, but he left this relative safe teaching job after he realized the new rule of this fast-changing world. In this "fast-paced" talk, Eddie gave us some examples(I only listed two in this summary). First, he drew two simple diagrams on the board and asked the TED audiences which horizontal line is longer. Surprisingly, people just answer the question based on the rule they learned in school. In fact, Eddie already modified these diagrams. If people actually look into these diagrams then they would easily find out the length of two horizontal lines are different. Second, Eddie takes a clear pipe with flow of water inside as an example. When we inject green ink into the pipe, the green ink will form a line. However, when we add more flow of water, the green line starts to violently disperse and diluted. At the end, all the green ink is disappeared. What is happening in today's business world is that pipe with flow of water, the rules have changed because of digital revolution, globalization, scale and the density of interaction. Eddie believed that the world is changing faster than we can keep up with it. Nevertheless, people nowadays are still trying very hard to address the problems based on our outdated rules and worldview. And that is why we need smart failures. Eddie believed that we should embrace smart failures. These failures are not traditional failures. Traditional failures come from lack of knowledge or execution, but smart failures come from people who takes risk in unknown areas and take innovative challenges. Many rules people used to comply with does not work. Therefore, Eddie believed that these kind of failures are very important to the learning process in the long run. The key lesson from Eddie's talk is that any major change will carry with certain amount of failures. But we don’t need to be afraid of that failures. Smart failures should be embraced as part of the learning process.