Failure as a strategy

Quite an ironic angle of view at making failure. I stumbled upon two examples where such strategy is being used.

"Joyful failures" at IDEO: http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/fast-company-staff/fast-company-blog/failure-success-strategy

Thomas Edison said "I have not failed. I have merely found 10,000 ways that won't work."
...
British entrepreneur James Dyson reports that he built 5,127 prototypes of his cyclonic vacuum before getting to one that was commercially successful.

Al Qaeda's potential use of failure as a strategy in recent Nigerian belt bomber case: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2009/12/failure-as-a-strategy.html

If al Qaeda did embrace failure as a strategy, we could expect them to:

 

  • Increase the frequency.  Since the level of effort required is very small, do more to generate substantive returns in red ink/securitization/bureaucratization.  Since suicide isn't even a requirement for the attacker, it would likely make it easy to hire them (payment to families for the effort would attract a vast pool of applicants).
  • Expand the venues.  Attack more types of places.  Schools, malls, etc.  Terrorist attacks are treated differently than even much more violent attacks by postal citizens in the same venues.  Why?  They are outsiders and the fear is that these attacks will be systemic rather than one offs.
  • Embrace more ethnicities/races to expand the profile of the terrorist.  The use of a Nigerian student is a first step on this.  Expand this profile to include Chinese, Indonesians, etc. to generate sweeping fear of all "outsiders."  Spread the bureaucratic restrictions on travel that would be generated in reactions to these attacks far and wide.    
As I have mentioned earlier, take on failure as a strategy could be extreme despite it merits. However, the essence is in embracing and accepting failures as part of achieving successes.

Also it is good to note that disruptive technologies during their inception are usually dismissed as FAIL.