In fact in almost all cases, letting people fail is how let them learn.
If I hire your firm and you tell me you can achieve an objective, then I spend money and come to find out you can't and you knew you couldn't, you've defrauded me. If I ask if you can perform a task and you tell me you know how, then I find out you have no idea, you've lied to me.
I'll take a "No, but I can figure it out" any day of the week, but lying is a cardinal sin in any relationship.
In fact I'm a tad little surprised that I'm having to sell the virtues of incremental failure in a forum that idolizes "Move fast and break things"
The thread is about working with Indian contractors who frequently lie, pretending they know what is going on. We are very much talking about this kind of problem.
> In fact I'm a tad little surprised that I'm having to sell the virtues of incremental failure in a forum that idolizes "Move fast and break things"
What I'm talking about is orthogonal to this. You can move fast and break things, but be straight forward to your manager about the risk involved.
The point is that pretending to know does not open up the conversation of risk and reward, whereas "No, but I can figure it out" can and typically will. If, at that point, the manager drops the ball by not making sure the risk / reward profile is correct then it is no longer on the engineer.
...in western business culture.
If someone doesn't want to be reliable, that's their choice, but don't expect me to be willing to engage in business with them.
In Mexico, Belize, southeast Asia, and southern Europe, I found everything to be much less reliable than I was used to. Everyone spent a lot time more waiting around. But I felt happier and more relaxed, and the people around me seemed to as well.
I think it might be more cultural than you seem to think.
We so easily accede to someone who says "its policy" without considering that the person involved clearly outranks whatever policy is being dealt with. Perhaps we've not been burned by strict adherence to policy and expecting the world to be regular and predictable as recently as those other cultures. It might just be a temporary thing, but I don't know. We've got things like "personal space" which were a very American concept for a long time, but which has since spread, almost certainly with many negative consequences, widely. So maybe this desire for people to accommodate systems rather than for systems to accommodate people will spread too. We're screwed if that's the case.
Sure you could argue that these nations are culturally Christian, but Christian culture still doesn't imply an emphasis on reliability.
At most I might agree with this being a case of the protestant work ethic, which seems to have a high correlation here (northern and central Europe as well as America is very much protestant, southern Europe is more catholic and orthodox).
However first of all most historians agree it's false, and second you get places like Germany, where the economic powerhouse is the catholic south (Baden-Württemberg has Porsche, Daimler (Mercedes), Audi and Bosch, Bayern (Bavaria) has BMW, the protestant North and East are more poor).
However, just because it's lauded in Christian writings and by Christians doesn't mean that Christians are any better in this respect than others, "we are all sinners and fall short of God's glory" afterall.
I imagine Buddhism to have a similar focus on truth?
Not for the person whose money you've spent on the failure.