Failure Breeds Success

I came across an interesting article recently about failure and how business, industry and sports are focusing on the learning and knowledge to be gained by failing.

A large pharmaceutical company had the moto " fail fast, fail cheap". This was all about developing new drugs quickly, carry out the initial tests, then decide whether to go into full scale testing or scrap the idea. The basis behind this was to reduce the huge and costly time it takes to develop new products only to find a large percentage (some 70%) failed before going to market.

I can apply the same theory to dog agility. If we're going to try something different i.e. a new weaving or contact method, get into the training quickly, work hard at it in a safe environment i.e at home or club, give yourself and dog a reasonable time to learn. Then decide whether to continue before slogging it out around competitions for months on end only to go back to your original method if it doesn't work. I would suggest 70% of people who start out trying something new in their chosen sport ultimately go back to their default behaviour after a prolonged period of trying. Of course if the new method does work then we need to fine tune it and develop it into a learned behaviour - but that's another blog entry...

It's good to fail, as long as we learn from it.