What Is Negative Learning — and Positive?
Lessons from Tesla, nuclear power, and 20,000 schools in Nepal.
In previous articles I described the success of smart scale-up in ventures as different as the construction of Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 and 20,000 Nepalese schools. I also recounted the failure of dumb scale-up at Japan’s Monju Nuclear Power Plant.
To better understand the success of Tesla and Nepal, and the failure at Monju, here I contrast dumb with smart scale-up.
Smart scale-up is modular and fast, built with basic building blocks, like LEGOs.
Smart scale-up is modular and fast, built with basic building blocks, like LEGOs. For Monju, there were no LEGOs for simple assembly into the overall project. Nothing was standardized. Everything was bespoke — designed and produced for this and only this one-off prototype.
Thus there is nothing at Monju that compares with the replication of the 21 production modules at Gigafactory 1, or the modularity and reproducibility of the 20,000 schools and classrooms in Nepal. At the Gigafactory and in Nepal, those involved learned from the delivery of one module to the next and thus got better and better and faster and faster at what they were doing.
