I found this interesting article in the UK Wired magazine on Kevin Dunbar, a researcher who studies how scientists study things.

The key points are captured below:

"[Kevin] Dunbar came away from his year of living 24/7 with scientists and four years analyzing the data with an unsettling insight: science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected."

"The scientific process...is supposed to be an orderly pursuit of the truth, full of elegant hypotheses and control variables. However, when experiments were observed up close this idealized version of the lab fell apart, replaced by an endless supply of disappointing surprises".

"So how did they deal with so much failure? Dunbar realized the vast majority of people in the lab followed the same basic strategy. First, they would blame the method. The surprising finding was classified as a mere mistake; perhaps a machine malfunctioned or an enzyme had gone stale. "The scientists were trying to explain away what they didn't understand," Dunbar says. "It's as if they didn't want to believe it."

I love how the end state of blame and disbelief exists even in the most rational work environments. How often do we blame before we work out what went wrong?

Check out the article here http://bit.ly/6PqQec but...

...the real reason for this post is to ignite conversation and thought around John Winsor's project on failure.

Check out his post below
http://www.johnwinsor.com/my_weblog/2010/01/lets-talk-about-the-other-f-word....