An interesting story:
Steve Jones is a geneticist, a well-known one, if you move in those circles. He tells an interesting story about failure. You can skip my version and watch it below if you wish.
The problem
There is a soap powder factory near Liverpool. It makes Persil and Surf and things like that.
In that factory they mix a bunch of ingredients together: water softeners, enzymes, bleach, detergent, and water. Then they pump the resulting slurry at high pressure and temperature through a spray nozzle. When they do that the water evaporates and leaves a powder that looks a little like snow. Finally they take that powder and put it in a box and sell it for a chunk of change.
But the people who do this for a living had a problem. The nozzle kept blocking. The powder that came out was too big or too small, too dry or too wet. If you make soap powder the last thing you need is a nozzle full of lumpy, gunky, almost but not quite, soap powder. It can get expensive quickly.
The solution to a problem like this is to find some experts.
Making soap powder is a lucrative business and Unilever is a wealthy company. It has research laboratories full of experts.
Expert team number one
The first set of experts were chemical engineers. They had qualifications in heat exchange mechanisms and applied mathematics. If fluid dynamics was top of your list, these were the men to have in the room.
Expert team number two
The second set of experts were evolutionary biologists. For my sins I was once an evolutionary biologist. People like me know all about sex, but only the theory, not the practice I’d hasten to add.
Which set of experts would you back?
The engineers…
Investigated the problem, wrote equations and held meetings. Then they designed and built a solution and implemented it. It was a better nozzle. I’d love to tell you how much better, but I can’t find a reference, so let’s go with not much better. The problems prevailed.
The biologists…
Took a different tack. They weren’t experts in making soap powder, but they did know about evolution.
They took the nozzle and make 10 copies of it, but no copy was exactly the same. Some were fatter, some were thinner. Some were taller or shorter. Some had notches in them, others had grooves. They were all slightly different.
Then they pumped soap slurry through the different nozzles until they blocked and looked at the results. They measured the quality and volume and worked out which of the ten nozzles was the best.
They threw away the 9 failures, took the best nozzle and made ten copies of it… Repeating the trial and error process for 45 generations. The picture below (via Matthew Syed) shows how the design of the nozzle changed. Developing from one generation to the next.
After they had failed four hundred and forty nine times, the biologists stopped. They had developed a nozzle that was (allegedly) hundreds of time better.
The lesson
Mistakes are inevitable. We live in a complex world. We can’t hope to understand everything. So don’t worry about making mistakes. Just make sure you have a way of capturing and learning from them.
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Image by Marina Burity
James,
A fascinating story and one that illustrates the power of learning via looking for solutions in lateral areas. My question would be who thought of asking evolutionary biologists and why?
Adrian
Hello James,
What a great example of taking the evolutionary approach. I find myself asking the same question as Adrian – how come folks pitted engineers against evolutionary biologists? Someone clearly had some understanding of evolutionary biology – as in process.
Maz
I’ve been following this blog for a few years now and this post is a good example of why. You cover things from some of the more unusual angles that other blogs don’t go anywhere near and it gives an interesting perspective.
Thanks Mark, glad you liked it