Freedom to Fail
My wife, Diana, and I love chocolate. It is perhaps our greatest weakness, especially as both of us try to stay physically fit with a very active lifestyle. One of our favorite dark chocolates comes individually wrapped in foil with a message printed inside each wrapper. Usually these are pretty blasé, so I was surprised when I found one message that read, “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
It started me thinking about how many great minds failed before they got it right. It is said that Thomas Edison conducted hundreds of experiments with various substances to be used as filaments before perfecting the incandescent light bulb. Initially he also used direct current from storage batteries for his experiments, then realized if electricity were to be practical, it needed the capability of being transmitted over long distances — hence the introduction of the alternating current that we still use today.
Over 20 years ago, two U.S. Navy scientists, Martin Fleischman and Stanley Pons, announced they had discovered cold fusion — a form of nuclear energy that simply put could provide a limitless power source without the nuclear waste or fear of nuclear meltdown. The problem was their discovery was not reproducible and hence their claim was rendered unfounded by the scientific community. Working from the original data and experiments, chemist Pamela Mosier-Boss, announced last month that she had once again found cold fusion, but after countless attempts she was also able to repeatedly reproduce the process in her laboratory.
Think of the possibilities? Is this the source of power for interplanetary space travel that provides power both for travel to and from a distant planet? Is this the source of unlimited “green” power that could be used to power homes, vehicles, airplanes and even the fire apparatus of the future? What implications does this have for helping us find a way to remain a highly productive society in an environmentally friendly world? But what would have happened if Mosier-Boss had not picked up the trail of Fleischman and Pons without the freedom to fail?
You may wonder what this has to do with the fire service. During difficult times with limited resources, thinking outside the box, developing a paradigm shift or just plain thinking creatively are hard to do, yet it is the very time we need to do so the most. While we are struggling with issues of firefighter safety, there isn’t a week that goes by without a story of a fire department facing personnel cuts, station closures, service eliminations and more. I am convinced that these are the very times we need to be most creative to help us evolve into the fire service of the future.
These solutions must come from within the fire service or surely they will come from outside sources that will not account for the dedication and service we provide to the citizens of our community. Which is worse: the indiscriminate losses of personnel and equipment by a bean counter or bureaucrat who doesn’t have a clue about firefighting, or a new paradigm shift from the leadership within the fire service that can adapt to our changing economic times without compromising our mission?
By way of example, in the past 30 years, both Russia and the United States have been at war within Afghanistan. The Russians lost hundreds of fixed-wing and rotary aircraft to the tribes and warlords in Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain. While many U.S. soldiers have been killed or injured during these eight years of war, our losses from aircraft have been far less than those suffered by the Russians. Why? In part this occurred because we refused to fight the same kind of war. Today over Afghanistan, unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Predator or the more advanced Reaper carrying Hellfire missiles are flying many missions. The pilots are hundreds or even thousands of miles away flying the unit by remote control. These UAVs also can loiter over an area relatively undetected for extended periods of time, but react much quicker to the needs of ground troops for support than having to sortie manned aircraft or helicopters for assistance.
Now to bring this discussion back to the needs of the fire service in these changing times, consider this a call for each of us to study and then apply the evolving science and technologies under research and development in the fire service and related fields; to study parallel organizations such as the U.S. military and the international fire service community for best practices; to study the mission we have today and visualize the mission we will most likely have tomorrow; and then to borrow the best from each of these areas to explore the possibilities of how we should evolve into the fire service of tomorrow.
Remember Edison? He didn’t get the light bulb right on his first time, but with each new attempt he continued his research “more intelligently” until he had it perfected. We would be wise to consider the same.
June 2nd, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Bob, the Soviet aircraft losses in Afghanistan resulted as much from U.S. efforts to supply the mujaheddin with shoulder-launched missiles through the CIA as it did with their tactics and the limits of the available aviation technologies. The recent Tom Hanks film does a decent albeit humorous job of depicting this, and helps illustrate why we still have this mess on our hands.
You’re right that the fire service can learn a lot from past failures. But I would like to see the lesson you started with — Afghanistan — studied more closely for lessons we can use in our industry. Sure, the U.S. is using advanced technology to its advantage with UAVs in the mountainous border region where we think al Qaeda’s leadership is holed up. But we might have avoided the necessity to develop and deploy these weapons in the region if we hadn’t abandoned it after the Soviets withdrew, which many observers had credited with the radicalization of those who now provide bin Laden safe haven.
Arming our enemies enemies was a good strategy in the 1980s when they were pointing their weapons at others, but it doesn’t look so smart now. While I am reluctant to label our labor unions, volunteer associations, and elected officials as enemies, we cannot escape the reality that we often face off against them under adversarial circumstances in which they use our own rhetoric and past actions against us.
As fire chiefs, we need to learn from past mistakes and avoid repeating them. We can start by not arming them in the first place with silly arguments about the importance of standards governing company staffing and response time for which we have little or no empirical support.
June 2nd, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I realize this is not central to your theme, but you have misrepresented the history of cold fusion. It was replicated in hundreds of major laboratories, in thousands of experiments. Mosier-Boss, Szpak et al. reported that they replicated the original Fleischmann Pons claims in 1991, in J. Electroanal. Chem., and in several other papers. More than 2,000 other authors published replications by 1995.
I have a collection of 1,200 peer-reviewed journal papers on cold fusion from the library at Los Alamos. I have uploaded a bibliography of 3,500 papers, and several hundred full text papers here:
http://lenr-canr.org
You probably read in the mass media that the original results were not reproducible and that Mosier-Boss finally managed to produce them again recently. This version of events has been widely reported, but it is nonsense. Before you comment on scientific research, I recommend you read the scientific literature rather than mass media reports.
Let me address your speculative question: “Is this the source of unlimited ‘green’ power that could be used to power homes, vehicles, airplanes and even the fire apparatus of the future?”
Probably yes. Cold fusion has produced thousands of times more energy per gram of fuel than any chemical reaction, and it can probably generate millions of times more. In some experiments, it has reached temperatures and power density comparable to the core of a conventional fission reactor. Cells have run for up to three months continuously. If the reaction can be controlled, it can probably be scaled up without much difficulty. Based on the cost of the fuel, cell materials and the manufacturing cost of similar devices such as batteries, it is likely that cold fusion energy will cost about a thousand times less than other sources when it is introduced, and eventually millions of times less. There is enough fuel available to supply energy at present rates for several billion years, longer than the sun is expected to last.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:07 am
On the Afghanistan example, I agree with Mark’s comments. As you know, in Afghanistan the fact that we gave those Stingers to the Mujahedins had a lot to do with the Russians losing all those planes and choppers. We created this pit-bull that is now biting us in our own rear. And we can all thank Zbigniew Brzezinski for this mess. But that is a different story all together.
Jed’s comments were great also. If true I am elated to see that cold fusion is within our grasp in a near future. That would not only eliminate our dependence on the foreign oil produced by the OPEC, but in the long run, it will also diminish the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East which could result in the reduction of political and military tensions in the region.
But to get back to Bob’s original article, I must say that it was a breath of fresh air. Freedom to Fail’s main message is that we must encourage our fire service leaders to step outside their cocoons and not fear failure. Bob tell us that it is OK to fail and shows us that Mosier-Boss actually picked up the ball and ran with it where Fleishman and Pons had left off. And Jed’s comments even further completes Bob’s thoughts when he mentions that there are many others besides Mosier-Boss who have also followed and duplicated the experiments without being afraid of the failure.
I only wish that we had hundreds of such fire service leaders amongst us. I agree with Bob we need to have fire service leaders of that caliber. But to achieve that level, I think that we need to change our philosophical outlook just a tad.
Our fire service leaders have been led to believe that “thinking outside the box” alone will do the job. As a result we are complacent and don’t risk stepping outside the restrictive boundaries of the “box”. There are risks associated with stepping “outside the box” and our peers are scared of failure.
“Think outside the box” all you want. “Thinking” alone to yourself is the safest thing that you can do. It is once you talk about those “thoughts” with your peers; and then working toward actually materializing those “thoughts” that increase the failure probabilities
I believe that the saying “think outside the box” is insufficient. We teach that in all our leadership courses, but that is simply not enough. Thinking is very important of course and it is the very first step. But then thinking alone won’t get us anywhere. One can think about a vacation in Hawaii for example; but unless he/she actually works hard on materializing those thoughts, he won’t be going anywhere.
I personally believe that the Japanese proverb “Action without Vision is a nightmare; Vision without Action is a daydream” is a more refined philosophical perspective. Think about it. If we do things without thinking it through, we will have a nightmare. And if we only think without taking any actions to materialize it, then we are merely daydreaming. It ties thoughts to action.
“Thinking outside the box” only makes us look progressive. It is the “walking the talk” that is even more important. Just my 2 cents. Oz
June 5th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I’ll take the bait on the think-outside-the-box comment. Like, Ozzie, I think this statement tends to be a bit trite and generally misses the mark, but I may have a slightly different reason.
If what’s inside the box is worth looking at, much less thinking about, we should recognize that the box has six sides, and consider that our view of what’s inside will change a little as we look at it from different angles.
Sometime, what’s inside the box settles to the bottom as suggested by the statement on many packages, which reads something like, “This product is sold by weight not volume; contents may settle during shipping.”
Often we can get a better view of what’s inside the box simply by shaking it a little bit to “fluff” the contents or put a little air or space between the items inside. Clearly, we don’t want to shake the box too hard, or the contents may break. But a gentle nudge or a little jostle usually won’t hurt anything. Knowing the difference between the two arguably involves an element of risk as suggested by Bob’s article.
Like, Ozzie, I agree the important point here is to move beyond thought and into action in a way that gives meaning to our best intentions.
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