“This might not work,” I told my co-facilitators during a recent Expedition.

Each of us was responsible for coaching a team of students. My team was thrashing, and we were already more than half-way through the Expedition.

“What are you going to do?” one of my co-facilitators asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t do it for them. I can’t give them the answer… I guess I just have to keep asking them questions and get them to ask good questions.”

Actually, I could have said, “I think you should do x, y, z” along with step-by-step-instructions.

So why did I resist that solution, especially when those students would have to present their work in a public forum to a panel of executives and dozens of audience members?

I resisted because “this might not work” was not merely an assessment of my team’s project—it is also a guiding principle for Expeditionaries. We have borrowed the concept from Seth Godin because of our conviction that students need to work on real problems, that matter to them, for which there are no predictable answers.

And when there are no predictable answers, failure has to be an option.

Except that it’s not failure when you’re working with tight feedback loops. In practice, that means:

Question-storm
Hypothesize
Probe
Ask better questions

True, in any given loop, a hypothesis “might not work.” But with enough feedback loops, and a culture grounded in purpose, “failure” is brief and almost always a springboard to growth.

So yes, this might not work.

And that’s exactly why the whole thing works.

p.s.: My team? It took them until the 11th hour, but they kept asking better questions and eventually they figured out a great solution.

***

Do you know a high school student, gap year student, or first year college student who might want to earn college credit for learning to design solutions to the world’s most pressing social problems?

They can apply for a spot in the October Expedition.

School leaders can also apply to send a team of students by contacting us directly.

***

Thank you for reading this post from Basecamp's blog, Ed:Future. Do you know someone who would find the Ed:Future blog worthwhile reading? Please let them know that they can subscribe here.