52. Samuel Arbesman: Decay, Wonder and Where Knowledge Lives

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Samuel Arbesman is a complexity scientist and writer. He is passionate about bringing together seemingly unrelated ideas from science and technology. Samuel works with companies and founders that recognize that the future happens at these boundaries, in such areas as open science, tools for thought, managing massive complexity, artificial intelligence, and infusing computation into everything from biology to manufacturing. Samuel’s scientific research examines such areas as scientific discovery and network science. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, and he was previously a contributing writer for Wired. Samuel is the award-winning author of Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension and The Half-Life of Facts. His most recent book is The Magic of Code. In addition, Samuel is a Senior Fellow of The Silicon Flatirons Center at The University of Colorado, and a Research Fellow at The Long Now Foundation. Previously, Samuel was a Senior Scholar in Research and Policy at The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a Research Fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He completed a PhD in computational biology at Cornell University and earned a BA in computer science and biology at Brandeis University.

51. Samuel West - The Honest Truth About Failure

Innovation is lonely work. Sam West built a museum of failure to make visible what organisations hide — and found it gives people permission. Working in innovation is lonely. You're usually pushing against the culture, not with it. You're the person asking "why not?" in rooms full of people paid to say "because." You try things that don't work, often in public, and the organisation's instinct is to move on quickly and quietly rather than ask what happened and why. In startup land there are spaces for this. F**k Up Nights — actual events where founders get on stage and tell the audience what went wrong — have become a real phenomenon precisely because there was nowhere else to say it. The relief in the room when someone is honest about failure is palpable. You can feel people exhale. Corporate innovation doesn't have that. It has words about failure — "we celebrate learning," "there are no bad ideas," "fail fast" — but not much else. The language of failure tolerance is everywhere. The actual practice of it is rare. And the people doing the hard work of trying new things inside large organisations often feel like they're doing it alone, without cover, in an environment that will quietly hold it against them if it doesn't work out. Samuel West, Founder and Curator, The Museum of Failure; Organisational Psychologist; PhD in Organisational Psychology, Lund University, has spent a decade studying exactly that gap. He built a museum full of things that failed — from global corporations to billion-dollar bets — precisely to make visible what organisations prefer to make invisible. The effect it has on people is not what you might expect. It doesn't make them cynical. It gives them permission. When you see that Apple, Google, and Procter & Gamble get things catastrophically wrong, something shifts. The fear shrinks a little. The risk feels more possible. He has also, as it happens, lived through a very public personal failure of his own — declared bankrupt over the museum itself. Which gives him a credential that no PhD can provide. This conversation is for anyone who has ever sat in a post-mortem and felt like nobody was really saying what happened. For anyone who has ever killed a project and felt they had to pretend it never existed. For the person who is doing innovation work right now and wondering why it feels so unrewarding even when they believe in it.

1. juli 202653 min

52. Samuel Arbesman: Decay, Wonder and Where Knowledge Lives

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