To paraphrase Alexander Pope, error is unavoidably human. The lessons we learn in life are often preceded by failure. We take chances to meet mysteries head-on and challenge ourselves to do things differently—to find out what could be. We must risk to gain because no outcome in life is predetermined. From our first steps to our first job and beyond, we turn opportunity into success through endeavor. The risks we accept are the karmic cost of seeing beyond the veil of the unknown.

In business, success is routinely measured by return on investment. It’s a stalwart, intransient metric as old as capitalism itself. What’s in it for me? It’s natural to want to minimize loss and maximize gain; that is bedrock business sense. Experimentation provides a low-risk Petri dish to test high-impact ideas. Oversight and control make for a safe place to try new tactics and stretch our legs creatively. It shouldn’t necessarily feel certain because good experimentation seeks to answer questions and not simply confirm what is known. If to err is human, then what is it to be error-free?

When our drive for efficiency and our desire for efficacy dominate our thinking, our flexibility hardens into a mass of performant perfectionism. We become blinded to possibilities by the garden walls of the status quo. When we are disincentivized to fail, we make sure we don’t. Experiments become riskless exercises in validation, designed to confirm what we already know. All KPIs met. All dashboard metrics point to green. Risk aversion becomes the fence that keeps us from exploring the horizon of new ideas. Nothing risked, but nothing gained.Successful experimentation demands the freedom to fail, to accept error as necessary to the process of discovery. Learning what doesn’t work can be just as valuable as finding out what does. Let’s roll up our sleeves, take a chance, and embrace our errors with confidence! We won’t find what is possible within the bounds of what is known.