I have a friend Matt who is brilliant and individualistic. The other night at dinner he told me that he doesn't like having coaches involved with his exercise. He said, "I taught myself to run. If something hurt or didn't feel right, I changed it until it felt better, and then when I saw the runners on the Olympics I noticed that their form was comparable to mine." Or something like that. While I appreciate that I had coaches to expedite the learning process during my swimming career, I thought Matt's method may have a unique merit in that it makes one comfortable with a Petroskian success-through-failure style of innovation.
Petroski defines a successful technology as one which corrects the perceived failure of the one which it is intending to replace. If you consider running form a technology, Matt was doing just that: Identifying a failure with his form (current failed technology), changing his form, and, if the failure was corrected, endorsing the new technology as successful by implementing it. Perhaps it would be healthy for all of us to learn something this way. It would certainly take longer, but it may teach us something as engineers.
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