The other day, in passing, a colleague used the expression “trial and error” and it set me thinking. As a believer in the power of experiential learning, I am in favour of trial runs and experiments. They are positively dripping in learning opportunities. In a very real sense, life is one trial after another. I often joke that everything I do is an experiment with uncertain outcomes.

Somehow, being in experimental mode adds spice to life and gives credence to all the things I do that turn out to be a hash. For example, I have recently been conducting some experiments with different marketing initiatives – telemarketing and placing adverts in magazines we have not used before. Both these experiments gobbled up money and produced no discernable financial return. Undaunted, I’m now on the brink of experimenting with data cleansing, customer segmentation and micro sites. These are all carried out in the spirit of trial and - the word sticks in my gullet - error.

“Trial and error” makes the latter seem an inevitable consequence of the former. I resent the built-in expectation that one will follow the other in the same way that winter follows autumn.

Errors and mistakes certainly sound more respectable when you can say, “Well, it was only an experiment”. Except that this, on its own, is a lame excuse with the most important thing left unsaid: what was learned from the experiment. The ultimate purpose of any experiment is to learn – and this also applies to experiments that turn out to be a roaring success, not just to the disappointments. I wont bore you with all the lessons learned from our telemarketing experiment, but here’s a few: about having a clear call for action, briefing the person doing the calls more thoroughly, carefully monitoring the early calls and adjusting the patter, the time of day the calls are made, the need to build in pauses for reviews of progress (or lack of it), and closer supervision of the whole project. In revenue terms this experiment was a flop, but in learning terms it was a very useful exercise.

So how about dropping the gloomy expression “trial and error” and replacing it with something more cheerful and encouraging such as “trial and learn”? Or perhaps that makes learning sound like a trial? Which, of course, it sometimes is.