Book Review – Riyadh Al-Balushi

I recently finished reading Mission Economy by Marianna Mazzucato, a great book urging governments to reconsider their role in capitalist societies by moving away from merely de-risking the supposed innovation of the private sector and instead leading economic, societal, and technological change.

The book explores the way the US government looked at itself at the time of the Apollo program when it decided that the whole of the United States, as a country, was on a mission to put a man on the moon. This set in motion a national agenda led by the government that resulted in countless innovations either created within the government itself or funded by the government as a direct response to the Apollo program: from GPS, camera phones, and laptops, to CAT scans, ear thermometers, and baby formula.

The relationship between the government and the private sector at that time had the government as the visionary of the future, with the private sector supporting the realisation of that bold and larger-than-life vision.

Contrast that with today, where it is common to perceive the government as an old, uninspired institution whose sole role is to create an environment for the private sector to come and innovate. In this role, the government must get out of the way and only intervene in the case of a market failure.

We all know that it is important to have a culture of experimentation in order to be able to grow. and that we need to respect the courage it takes to attempt to do something new, even if that thing does not result in a successful outcome.

What I enjoyed about the Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson is that it creates a framework for classifying failures into basic failures, intelligent failures, and complex failures. Basic failures are those that result from inattention, neglect, overconfidence, and faulty assumption, and one should strive to reduce basic failures. Intelligent failures on the other hand are those that take place in a new territory, provide opportunities to advance towards a desired goal, are informed by available knowledge, and are small yet provide valuable insights. When these attributes are met, the failures can be just valuable as the successes in the experiments as they can provide critical known for one’s missions and objectives.

The book also explores complex failures that result from the operation of interconnected systems where failures in complex settings can be multicausal and have external factors. The book provides a framework for understanding such systems and provides recommendations on how to manage these failures by learning from previous complex failures, paying attention to early warnings, encouraging false alarms, and leveraging recovery windows.

The biggest takeaways for me were the ideas on how to create a culture that encourages reporting errors and failures without fear of repercussions, which is not easy to do in Omani culture.