What to Take and Leave From Design Thinking and the Scientific Method

Most teams in social impact are more experimental than they get credit for. They test, they iterate, they build a hypothesis about how to reach the people they serve and adjust when reality pushes back. The sector already borrows from the scientific method and from design thinking, whether or not anyone names it that way.

I have watched hundreds of these teams up close. The place I keep seeing the borrowed methods break down isn't the experimenting. It's what happens after something doesn't work.

Science made its peace with this long ago. A failed experiment carries as much information as a successful one, and researchers publish both, so the whole field gets smarter from what didn't pan out. The sector almost never does. Jonathan can't think of a single blog or talk called "I tried to solve homelessness and I totally failed."

The reasons are structural. Admit failure to your board and your job can be on the line. Tell a funder a program didn't work and you risk the funding stream a dozen livelihoods depend on. So the failure gets reframed as a learning, smoothed over for the annual report, and the insight that could have helped the next org in the sector disappears.

Science built failure in and rewards the people who report it honestly. Social impact built the opposite, and it treats a lost grant as a kind of moral failing in a way a startup burning venture money never would.

Design thinking gets the same pushback lately, and I want to defend it. It was built for these messy, wicked problems, the ones with no clean answer, to get teams out of endless planning and in front of the people they serve with something real.

The throughline is discernment: knowing which failures you can afford and which you can't. You can fail on the format of an event; you cannot fail at getting food to the person who needs it.

So the question this episode leaves open is one I haven’t answered for myself. Whose job is it to change this, and what would the sector look like if we let ourselves say out loud what didn't work?
 

Episode Highlights:

[00:01:00] The lab: kicking an idea around about the scientific method 
[00:03:30] Defining design thinking and the scientific method, side by side 
[00:04:30] Where the two frameworks overlap and where they split 
[00:06:00] Mapping both onto how the sector actually works 
[00:08:00] The real failure point: we won't admit when things don't work 
[00:09:30] Funders, boards, and the pressure to hide what failed 
[00:11:00] How science learned to publish its failures 
[00:14:30] The scale of failure and when it's safe to name it
[00:18:00] A closed-door conference where funders aren't invited 
[00:20:00] Building a team culture that works with failure 
[00:22:30] Why the sector treats a lost grant as worse than startups burn funding 
[00:24:30] In defense of design thinking 
[00:27:00] Experiments and pilots run on different timescales 
[00:29:00] A small, real example of design thinking at Cosmic 
[00:31:00] Knowing where failure is okay and where it isn't

Notable Quotes:

[00:08:25]: "Failure of an experiment is just as valuable as the success of an experiment. In fact, those words don't really even map to science, because simply executing the science soundly is success." Jonathan Hicken 

[00:09:45]: "You don't want to tell your donors you messed up and you failed. But that's the trap. That's the irony: we actually do, especially at a sector-wide level, need to be real about what works and what doesn't." Eric Ressler 

[00:10:40]: "If I tell a funder that this didn't work, then I've just risked that funding stream, and I'm supporting a bunch of people in their livelihoods that I don't want to put at risk." Jonathan Hicken 

[00:16:45]: "We have to avoid the common gravity toward reframing failure as a good learning or a win in a way that diminishes the true insight we can get from admitting it didn't work." Eric Ressler 

[00:20:35]: "If we accept going in that some things won't work, then there's no shame in naming it when it happens, because it's there." Jonathan Hicken 

[00:32:00]: "The questions to ask are: what are the stakes of failure for this experiment, and who carries the burden if it fails?" Eric Ressler 

Resources & Links:

• You Design Your Culture. Here's How : Designing Tomorrow Podcast Episode from August 18, 2026
• Stanford Social Innovation Review article on design thinking and evidence — mentioned at [00:03:00].
• IDEO U — design thinking courses, mentioned at [00:26:30]
• Stanford d.school — design thinking courses, mentioned at [00:26:30]

P.S. — Struggling to align your message with your mission? We help social impact leaders like you build trust-building brands through authentic storytelling, thoughtful design, and digital strategy that works. Let's talk about your goals »

Full Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:00:55]: All right, Jonathan, I've got this thing kicking around in my brain that I need to tease out with you on the podcast, so it can get out of there and start to become a little more real.

Jonathan Hicken [00:01:05]: This is one of my favorite kinds of these episodes. It's one where we just kick around an idea.

Eric Ressler [00:01:10]: It's the lab. It's the lab here for my brain. So lately I've been thinking a lot about the scientific method. Don't ask me why. As I work with teams, one of the things I'm endlessly curious about is how these people think about doing their work every day. And what's really cool about being in my position is I get to see that from dozens of different vantage points a year, if not more. At this point, hundreds of different teams at different stages, doing different work in different niches in the social impact space.

What I've noticed is that a lot of teams use elements from the scientific method, mostly experimentation, iteration, developing hypotheses around how to do their work. And I'm well versed in some of the design thinking frameworks and methodologies given my background as a designer, and there's some overlap between those two. I want to dig into both. And I want to talk to you specifically about this, given that you're in a role at a science center, and a lot of the way you run your shop is based in some of those principles of science too. So that's my topic for today.

Jonathan Hicken [00:02:30]: And tease out: what can we learn from design thinking or the scientific method that could help social impact perform more optimally? Or where are we failing when it comes to executing on our work? Is that the idea?

Eric Ressler [00:02:45]: What should we take from those? What should we leave from them? Because there's been some criticism, some of it fair, around design thinking not actually fulfilling its proposed promise as the best approach to social impact and solving wicked, intractable problems.

Jonathan Hicken [00:03:05]: And there was an article out of the Stanford Social Innovation Review recently, basically saying, "Hey, we've collected all this evidence on all this stuff. Why aren't the results better?" There's also a little bit of a knock on the scientific method right now as well.

Eric Ressler [00:03:15]: Exactly. So let's dig in, because I think both of these frameworks have some validity, and I have my own hypothesis around where we are not actually being very scientific in this work.

Jonathan Hicken [00:03:30]: Let's define these two ideas to begin with, design thinking and scientific method. I'll start with scientific method. The simple version is: I have a question about the world. I develop a hypothesis about what I think is happening. I observe, I measure, I test in a way that others could replicate. I publish it, whether or not the hypothesis was correct or incorrect. I get it out into the world. Maybe I do another experiment, maybe somebody else does, but I've contributed that knowledge to the knowledge base of humanity.

Eric Ressler [00:04:05]: And my take on a simple articulation of design thinking is essentially understanding or identifying a problem, empathizing with the people most affected by that problem through listening, developing quick prototypes and testing them with those same people, learning from those prototypes, iterating, and ultimately building toward a solution.

So there's a lot of overlap between the two frameworks, but there are also a couple of distinct differences worth pointing to. Science is working mostly toward understanding and being able to generalize that understanding, to replicate it, to reduce bias, to design things so it's as controlled as possible. Design thinking embraces the constraints and doesn't try to create something replicable so much as something custom built for that particular situation, with a goal of solving the problem specifically. So in my mind these are two potentially helpful frameworks or toolkits that we should be pulling from in this space.

Jonathan Hicken [00:05:15]: And what's similar between them is there's a problem, there's a certain level of activity that you do several times until you get it right. And what's also similar is that you eventually ship something.

Eric Ressler [00:05:25]: You ship something. And they're both trying to solve a problem of uncertainty. You're uncertain about what the right solution's going to be in the case of design thinking. So you embrace that uncertainty and you try to get out of thinking and into doing. The big takeaway for me around design thinking is that you can intellectualize something forever, but until the rubber actually meets the road, you don't really know. So shipping and getting stuff into the real world and iterating from there.

And on the science side, it's really about testing your understanding of something, again through applied science, through research, through the real world and real results. Now, of course there's theoretical science and other types beyond that, but when we're talking about applied science and the scientific method, it's really about material stuff in the real world.

Jonathan Hicken [00:06:20]: Let's map that to social impact then. So we as founders or executive directors or people in the space, generally speaking, we see a problem, we devise a solution, and we implement it, hopefully for the purpose of some positive results for the world. So where are we not lining up with design thinking or the scientific method, in your estimation?

Eric Ressler [00:06:50]: Going back to the beginning of the episode, where I've been in this position to see a number of different teams, I'd say there are different levels of adoption. Most teams aren't sitting there thinking about how they're going to use the scientific method to do their work. Now, sometimes they are. We've worked with organizations that are literally doing science. But not all orgs are leaning into this at that level of depth.

I do think generally the space tends to be experimental. Given that these problems are wicked, complex, intractable, there's usually not just a proven, known solution. And if there is, it might not work in the same community you serve. So there's that uncertainty piece. We're not certain how we should best solve this problem. So we either need to guess or we need to test, or some combination of the two. What I see is a lot of teams being willing to experiment. Not all teams, some are stuck in their ways, and even that feels kind of scary. Where I think we fail the most in the principles of both the scientific method and design thinking is being willing to admit and learn from failure. That's what I've observed.

Jonathan Hicken [00:08:20]: And that's fundamental to the scientific process. Failure of an experiment is just as valuable as the success of an experiment. In fact, those words don't really even map to science, because simply executing the science soundly is success. So where I think you're getting at is, especially as it relates to impact metrics, end-result metrics: where are we as a sector allowed to name that failure for the purpose of the collective understanding of how to solve these problems?

Eric Ressler [00:09:05]: So let's practice a little design thinking here in real time and have some empathy for people like you and others in the social impact space who wake up every day and are passionately, sometimes thanklessly, working on really difficult issues, not always in the best situations. To ask them to do that work their best, tirelessly, fail, and then tell the world they failed. You see why this doesn't happen.

And then when you start to consider the power dynamics of funders and these organizations, whether those are institutional funders or high-net-worth individuals or family offices or even everyday folks contributing, you don't want to tell your donors you messed up and you failed. That's not a thing you want to do to build confidence and a strong reputation of being an effective social impact organization. But that's the trap. That's the irony right there: we actually do, especially at a sector-wide level, need to be real about what works and what doesn't and what we learned from that. And that's just a really tough tension that is systemic in nature and complex to get through.

Jonathan Hicken [00:10:15]: You could bring that down all the way to the individual motivation level. You've got an executive director or whomever who, in my case, would be like: if I go to my board and I admit failure, my job is on the line. That's my family's wellbeing on the line if the board misinterprets what I'm bringing to them. And then you scale that up to the organizational level: if I tell a funder that this didn't work, then I've just risked that funding stream, and I'm supporting a bunch of people in their livelihoods that I don't want to put at risk. So there's an inherent contradiction in admitting failure. But that's a real problem for the sector, if we're learning all these things and we're not talking about them.

Eric Ressler [00:11:05]: And this is what I've been spinning around in my brain: how did science get over that? Because science did, overall. Let's think about drug science as maybe the closest parallel, where a lot of money's on the line. You're doing drug trials with the hope that your drug cures the disease. And maybe if you fail, maybe you do get fired if you're the lead researcher or the lead scientist. I'm not deeply versed in that world. But my sense is that overall, science as a field has done a better job of building in and embracing failure, and scientists publish their failures in journals that other scientists read. And we do that a little bit in the sector, but not even close to the same level.

Jonathan Hicken [00:11:50]: Yeah, I can't think of a single article or blog or video I've seen that was like, "I tried to solve homelessness and I totally failed."

Eric Ressler [00:12:00]: I've seen a couple like that, to be fair, but they're pretty rare, and they're definitely the edge case and not the norm.

Jonathan Hicken [00:12:10]: And they're probably people for whom the risk of putting that out in the world is gone or diminished in some way. Now I'm speculating, but maybe people who have moved past the sector or into other roles, where being so blunt isn't such a risk.

Eric Ressler [00:12:30]: Well, the other thing there, reflecting on the articles I've read, they're usually from institutional funders. Part of me is like, that's good, they should be doing that. That's part of their job, to make these investments, these bets on impact, work with practitioners who are on the ground and know this stuff really well. And they're in a unique position to publish what worked and what didn't. But then I see a counterargument too: what if one of those folks publishes something with a really credentialed, high-reputation take, like, "oh, this intervention doesn't work." But actually it just didn't work that one time, and now everyone else whose business is built on that intervention suddenly struggles.

So I want to acknowledge, I see how we got here as a sector. And yet I keep coming back to: this is holding us back in a major way, and I can't quite figure out whose burden it is to change this. Is this something that we as a sector need to think about more deeply, and folks like you need to be publishing your failures? I have a hard time saying, Jonathan, every time you mess up you should be publishing about it to your donors and your supporters and your board. And at the same time, on the flip side, you're learning a lot through failures at times. We all fail. None of us are perfect. And that learning, the insights from that, maybe you don't even fully learn from it because you don't want to admit the failure. The move is to paper over it, to reframe it, to spruce it up for the impact report and the annual report and your funder reports, so that it looks like you're doing a good job. And you are doing a good job, there's a lot of success too. So what does that bring to mind for you?

Jonathan Hicken [00:14:20]: There are a few things. First is the scale of failure. It's true, I am willing to talk about failures at a project level or an operational level, these smaller, lower-stakes things where, honestly, it's okay if I name the failure here, because the impact is still happening, or I'm still confident we're delivering on our promise big picture, even if this one little piece didn't work. So there's an element of scale: at what point is it no longer safe to talk about failure? And I certainly suffer from this. I'm motivated to tell the absolute best story about the work we're doing.

In fact, I think you and I are a little bit guilty here. We're teaching people how to talk about this stuff in a really compelling way, which is a superpower, especially if you need to obscure failure. We can tell a great story.

Eric Ressler [00:15:30]: Hey friends, real quick before we continue today's episode. I'm Eric Ressler, founder and creative director at Cosmic. Cosmic is a creative agency purpose-built for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. For the last 15 years, we've helped leaders like you nail your impact story and sharpen your strategy. But we're not here to just leave you with a fancy slide deck and a pat on the back. We roll up our sleeves and help you bring ideas to life through campaigns, creative, and digital experiences. Our work together helps you earn trust, connect deeply with your supporters, and grow your fundraising and your impact. If you value the thinking we share here and want it applied to your biggest challenges, let's talk at designbycosmic.com. All right, back to today's conversation.

So this brings to mind something for me: I don't think we should expect folks like you to publish every failure they have. But maybe one step we can commit to is being honest internally with our teams, like, "Hey, this was our hypothesis. We tested it. Here are the results, and here's where it worked and here's where it didn't." Or, "Hey, this thing didn't work." And we've got to be real about that and avoid the common gravity toward reframing it as a good learning or a win in a way that diminishes the true insight we can get from admitting it didn't work.

I've experienced this. We do retrospectives on every project, and there are times where I can feel our project team, out of respect and deep care for one another, not want to bring up parts of the project that failed, or risk throwing people under the bus. But then there are times where I'm like, this isn't a real retrospective if we aren't willing to have those tough conversations, and even, this is delicate, call out respectfully where either individuals or parts of the process didn't work. Because if we can't even do that, then why are we doing a retrospective? And that's just one example. I've felt the same way about new ideas and initiatives. I have ideas right now that I'm really excited about that are probably really dumb, that in six months I'm going to be like, what was I thinking?

Jonathan Hicken [00:17:55]: Building the habit and building the comfort with discussing failure is certainly part of it. Although when you bring up that example, okay, we can build this shared comfort with it, but if it's just within the team, what is that really doing for the sector? So where my mind goes is, maybe we just hatched another conference idea. What are the forums for discussing this failure in a safe place? How do we mitigate the risks that exist to discussing failure? And the risks are primarily social capital and funding. So what's an environment where you can remove those risks, where the social capital and the funding are not on the line, but we can still have that collective learning and collective growth? A closed-door conference where funders are not invited, which is the opposite of what we usually do, where we can really be real about this stuff.

Eric Ressler [00:18:55]: And my sense is that there are things like that going on at some level. There's not the de facto one, though. I couldn't name that conference right now.

Jonathan Hicken [00:19:05]: The social impact failure conference.

Eric Ressler [00:19:05]: Could we all go dressed up in costume and anonymized or something?

Jonathan Hicken [00:19:10]: TM, TM, TM.

Eric Ressler [00:19:10]: I like that idea a lot, man, because it reminded me of this Silicon Valley site where you used to be able to talk about your employer anonymously.

Jonathan Hicken [00:19:25]: Oh, Glassdoor?

Eric Ressler [00:19:25]: No, there was another one specific to the startup world. It's kind of like that, because there's that fear of not being hireable. You don't want to go talk about the company you're just at, but it was this sector-wide thing for the startup community: "Hey, who to watch out for," or "here's what it's like to work there." Glassdoor is a similar thing. I don't know if that's quite the right flavor of it, but I like the idea of giving us permission as a sector to redefine what failure means and to embrace it to a degree. It's a big ask to say start publishing all your failures, and I don't even know if that's the right move right away. But what do you think about the idea of starting internally? I know that's something you do at some level.

Jonathan Hicken [00:20:15]: Failure is something we discuss regularly on my team. Failure is encouraged, because we need to be able to take risks as we try this ambitious new vision, and we know some things are going to work and some aren't. We accept that as truth going into the work. And so if we accept it going in, then there's no shame in naming it when it happens, because it's there.

Now, there are certain things we can accept failure in and certain things we can't. Part of my job as executive director is to draw those lines for the team: here's where we can fail, here's where we can't. A really simple example would be, we're going to try this new event and a new format, and maybe we'll learn that it totally flopped and we're never going to do that again. And you know what, that's fine. No one is ever going to hold us to account on an event that sucked. But we cannot miss our revenue and expense numbers, because then the stakes are too high. That's a simple example of knowing where failure is acceptable.

So I do think that's a muscle we all need to have, and maybe one that doesn't exist pervasively. It's fundamental to how I work. I've never worked on a team that didn't have that, because I need to work in places that embrace that. But the question becomes, how does that spread? How does that discussion of failure cross organizations?

Eric Ressler [00:21:55]: I'm reflecting on a couple of things. One, we just did an episode about how to design your organizational culture. And to me this is a big part of that culture building. It's building in a standard and a guardrail around what you can fail on, and encouraging people to rethink failure. Because a lot of people in our space have been deeply trained that failure equals bad. I think that's a deep, almost subconscious belief in the sector.

Jonathan Hicken [00:22:25]: I'd say that's not even the sector, man. That's societal. Most of us grow up believing that getting a C on an assignment is failure, and that's bad.

Eric Ressler [00:22:35]: Yeah, these are deeply held, deeply rooted beliefs from school age. Watching our kids get into grade school and seeing homework and grades starting to come in, it's like, oh, here we go, it begins, the standards, the structure. So I agree it's not just the sector. But I do think there's something distinct about this sector that makes failure even worse. And I think it's because when you think about failure to the mission, the stakes can literally be deadly for the people we're trying to help at times. And if not deadly, you're putting donor dollars on the line in a way that, hey, if a startup throws away a million dollars from VC funding, we just cough at it, like, yep, cost of doing business. But in our space, a million-dollar grant from a major foundation wasted is somehow much worse. Even that, I'm starting to think, why is that the norm?

Jonathan Hicken [00:23:30]: Let's imagine a sector where failure was embraced and celebrated. What would that world look like, and how would it be different from today?

Eric Ressler [00:23:40]: This is part of why I'm kicking this around. I think it's the third time I've introduced this topic loosely and then said, all right, we're just going to do the episode. Because I believe it would be a much better, more effective, more joyful sector to be part of.

Jonathan Hicken [00:23:55]: I think we'd also deliver better results. Because if we're all stumbling over the same problems, and obviously in social impact there are a million variables that could change someone's circumstance, but just to use housing as an example: if one housing group fails and that lesson can be shared across to other housing groups, that's collective learning that maybe isn't happening right now. And maybe we actually start to see an acceleration of social impact results.

Eric Ressler [00:24:25]: Yeah, I think we would. And again, I don't want to paint this as no one is doing this, but there's lots of room for us to take it to the next level as a sector. Can we talk about design thinking a little bit too? Because we've gone into the scientific method and this failure thread, which is probably, in my opinion, the crux of why the scientific method is not being applied properly in our space. Similarly, on the design thinking side, design thinking is an incredible framework that can be applied. Does it have shortcomings? Is it the absolute perfect solution for all problems? No. But it's gotten some flack and pushback in the space as of late, and I'm here to defend it a little bit.

What I want to say about design thinking is that it's built specifically for these types of problems, the ones described as wicked or intractable, that don't have clear solutions, where you have to embrace, hey, it's going to be a little messy. And that's what I like about this approach: as much as we want to be evidence-based, and this is where we start to diverge a little from the scientific method, it's going to be messy, it's going to be imperfect. Design thinking embraces that, but most importantly it gets you out of the overthinking, over-intellectualizing, over-planning mode that I find our sector falling into far too often. I see this through orgs where we have the three-to-five-year strategic plan that's perfectly, neatly laid out. And I'm not here to totally bash strategic planners, I know that seems to be the thing we do on the show a lot, but what I am here to challenge is, that's not how the world works, man. It just isn't. I'm not saying you shouldn't plan long term, but I'd like to see orgs take a lot of that time they're putting into planning and run experiments and prototypes and get them in front of the people they're actually trying to help and serve. That's what design thinking is built to do. So I'd encourage anyone in the social impact space, there are great resources online. IDEO University runs courses, the Stanford d.school runs courses that are pretty reasonably affordable. You can do them remotely or in person. I'd just like to encourage the sector to dig into this a little bit more.

Jonathan Hicken [00:27:00]: There's a clarification worth making here, which is that experiments and prototyping can happen on different timescales. And that's really important, because there might be someone listening thinking, "I can't do a two-week experiment when I'm dealing with social services." And I'd say, fair enough. Your experiment could look like a three-year pilot, where you have enough runway to educate your beneficiaries on how this is going to work for a little while and test something out. So I just want to name that the implementation of some of these ideas can happen on different timescales. What matters is that you're going in comfortable with the fact that this might not work, and that you're prepared to learn and share what comes out of it.

Eric Ressler [00:27:45]: And design thinking, the other element that's especially appropriate for our sector, is that it embraces and expects iteration. You're expecting the prototype to fail, and the whole purpose is to learn from those failures and come up with a new version and do it again. You repeat that process until you have something worth shipping, and that's even a bit of a judgment call at that point.

Jonathan Hicken [00:28:10]: Something worth noting in design thinking, and in the scientific process a little bit, is that the process is in service of a very clear result, a very clear endgame. In the sector we can get distracted, and this might not even be the sector, this could just be business in general, but we can get distracted by inputs. Maybe it's what serves the staff best, maybe it's what serves donors best, maybe we think it optically looks best. There are all these variables that could derail an experiment or have us iterating toward outcomes that matter less than the impact outcome.

Eric Ressler [00:29:00]: Yes. I think you have to take all of those into account, and that's where discernment comes in, and where leadership comes in to a degree. To take it back to your example, to make this not feel like such a big academic thing for people to take on: recently we've been making some project management changes at Cosmic, like how and where we communicate, in an effort to reduce the number of channels we have to check every day. Simple thing. I want to shout out Karen on my team, because I had some ideas, we had some ideas, Karen and I, and she took it upon herself to go interview everyone on the team and hear from their point of view where things were falling apart, and basically challenged a lot of assumptions that Karen and I had made around where things were hard.

And what we learned is that a lot of the pain points Karen and I had were completely irrelevant to the rest of the team members, partially because of our roles. Nonetheless, we're making some changes, but that's a very simple version of design thinking. First of all, she had enough empathy to go ask the people who were going to be affected by this. She listened. Right now we're in the prototyping process, we're rolling out some changes. And what we said to the team is, hey, this is an experiment, it might fail, and if it fails, that's okay. I even said today, we can control-Z this thing. And then Lisa on my team was like, well, we're probably not going to control-Z it, but we're going to iterate. So is this the absolute perfect textbook version of design thinking? No, but we're taking the parts that matter. And in this case the parts that matter are: are we engaging the people who are actually affected by this problem and the proposed solutions? Do we have empathy for them? Are we listening to them? Are we building out prototypes and experiments, and are we willing to fail and iterate from that? So it can be something as small as that. It doesn't have to be your entire focus toward impact.

Jonathan Hicken [00:30:50]: And there's a lesson in that if we extrapolate that example toward a really big, hairy social impact problem. Let's say hunger, for example, and food banks, and how are we getting food to people who need food? There could be experiments in terms of, we still need to get food to the right people, but the way we do that, this part of the process or that part, could we get more throughput? There are things you can tweak and improve on that don't risk the results of getting people food who need it. And I think that's the crux there of knowing where failure is okay and where it's not. We can't fail at getting that person the food. We can fail at this particular piece of the process, which we know we can roll back. We can reverse that. That's something that for you is like, we can't stop delivering great quality product to our clients, but we can tweak this piece and we're okay with it failing. And that's that discernment that I think maybe could be cultivated more broadly.

Eric Ressler [00:32:00]: Yeah. And the questions to ask are: what are the stakes of failure for this given experiment? Who carries the burden of those mistakes if they fail? Are we asking the beneficiaries, the people who need food? If we fail, they're not going to get food. Well, first of all, the stakes are too high, and the risk is going toward the wrong people. Now, I'm not saying you should never experiment on things that might be high stakes, but you have to be really cognizant of that.

Jonathan Hicken [00:32:25]: All right. Well, look: scientific method, failure, design thinking, I think there's something here. At minimum, we came up with a new conference idea, social impact FailCon 2027.

Eric Ressler [00:32:40]: Get your costumes and masks ready, folks.

Jonathan Hicken [00:32:40]: Thanks for bringing the topic.

Eric Ressler [00:32:40]: Yeah, thanks for riffing out with me, Jonathan. If you enjoyed today's video, please be sure to hit like and subscribe, or even leave us a comment. It really helps. Thank you. And thank you for all that you do for your cause, and for being part of the movement to move humanity and the planet forward.