🐿️ Tracer Bullets - The Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter

Originally published 5th May 2025

More Wronger, More Better

When attacking at night, modern armies use tracer bullets that glow in flight, so the gunners can see their shots in the air. What’s really interesting about this tactic is that it’s specifically designed to illuminate errors (literally!) The soldiers don’t expect to hit the target on the first try, or even the fiftieth—but watching the path of the tracers gives them instant feedback on what’s wrong with their aim. And that means they can race around the OODA loop, improving with nearly every shot and zeroing in on the target at great speed.

A team I’ve just started working with is building new, cutting-edge products that will provide helpful, insightful responses to complex customer questions. But I startled the executive sponsor by telling her on day one that her new software is going to produce a steady stream of wrong answers—and that she should be happy about that! I’m telling her to think like a gunner, firing at the target but knowing you’re going to miss. The resulting large volume of inaccuracies, together with rapid feedback from internal and external users, is like a hail of tracer bullets that lights up the whole scene and guides the engineers directly to the right results.

Far too many companies view every software defect, product imperfection, and missed sale as a calamity, even making “zero bugs” or “no churn” a quarterly target. By contrast, I encourage my clients to see errors as learning opportunities, and help them find safe ways to make more mistakes faster. If this reminds you of SpaceX blowing up Starshiup after Starship, you’ve got the right idea—although your snafus don’t have to cost $50m each!

But even the smart few who cherish their errors often get only a fraction of the potential value out of their fruitful faults. For instance, recently a CEO client of mine boasted (rightfully!) about his firm’s highly disciplined “root cause analysis” process, which regularly brought to light important flaws in design or execution. But when I challenged him to name process or cultural changes that had resulted, his look was as blank as can be—and that means his crew were missing valuable improvements that could wipe out armies of defects at a single stroke.

To see how not to do it, check out recent post-mortems from Crowdstrike and OpenAI, which focus exclusively on technical changes to address egregious and costly errors. Compare those with Feynman’s appendix to the Challenger disaster report, which goes beyond the mechanics of O-rings and turbine blades to address over-optimism, management whitewashing, and the normalisation of deviance. Are you unearthing and fixing painful cultural issues like these? Are you doing it every month or every week, whenever you have a significant failure?

I’ve been pushing teams to ask the fifth why for 15 years, and those brave enough to do it have reaped huge rewards from tight team alignment and cultural practises that make mistakes very difficult to make. “Ready, fire, aim”, coupled with a relentless and fearless pursuit of better norms, dramatically boosts team performance. Why aren’t you doing it?

This first appeared in my weekly Insanely Profitable Tech Newsletter which is received as part of the Squirrel Squadron every Monday, and was originally posted on 5th May 2025. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/