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Benchmarking Worst Practices

By Peter Lloyd

Most creative people, I would think, look to best practices when choosing whom to emulate. Winners don’t usually imitate losers. The idea of benchmarking is to find the best, start where they left off, and beat the pants off them. But that strategy will only get you so far. Don’t overlook losers. They have valuable lessons to teach.

Certainly you want to learn from the triumphs of the best, but you can learn just as much, if not more, from the blunders of the worst. You don’t want to repeat anybody’s mistakes, but your peers may forgive you for tripping where the greats have stumbled. It’s much harder, however, to save face when you’ve fallen into a hole left by a fool. So know your fools.

Understand Blunder
Benchmarking worst practices means understanding how not to make the most fundamental blunders, the ones that embarrass beyond your ability to fast talk or tap dance your way out of them. You never want to start a chess game with an old, classic mistake, like fool’s mate. photo of seabiscuit and red pollardEven worse, you don’t want to be Seabiscuit in the lead, with the finish line in sight, and get passed on your jockey’s blind side.

The worst mistakes arise from fundamental human weaknesses and natural inclinations. That’s why we need to be reminded again and again why people fail. We were supposed to learn most of the old mistakes in school. And not just the mistakes, but the folly behind them. But then nothing is more certain than the redundancy of human folly. It repeats itself. Oops, I already said that.

Embrace Risk
Benchmarking only the best precludes learning one of the biggest lessons of all—that the worst often fail because they do not put everything on the line. Therefore, they do not fail as often, which is the biggest mistake. You can’t succeed big unless you risk failing big. And that means taking big chances. photo

Just ask Samuel Pierpont Langley. He had it all—ivy league education, professional success, accolades, publications, government grants, a nice suit. But a couple of greasy-knuckled bike-shop owners beat him to self-propelled, controlled flight. While Langley took the safe route, catapulting his flying machines into calm skies over the Potomac, the Brothers Wright flew hard and fast into the tempestuous winds of Kitty Hawk.

Both contenders failed again and again, but the Wrights learned so much more from the harder hits they took. And then they won.

Lose Control
Finally, risk isn’t risk if you’re in control. Unless you face the real chance of failure, you don’t gain the advantages of risk. It wasn’t privilege and position that handicapped Langley, it was the safer path he cut.

Risk makes winners and losers out of kings and paupers alike. You can learn as much from the folly of King Lear as you can from Willy Loman. They both lost their minds, their families, and their lives, but not until they exhausted all their energy flying in the face of fate.

Perhaps Willy’s wife, Linda Loman, said it best. “A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.”

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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