When the Brodie helmet, designed by John Leopold Brodie in 1915, was introduced to the British Army in the First World War it was intended to protect the soldiers from flying shrapnel. Until 1915 soldiers went into battle wearing soft cloth caps but it soon became apparent from the huge number of fatal head wounds from modern artillery weapons that something more was needed.
After the French army first introduced tin helmets, the British army swiftly followed suit. Yet when the War Office recorded the number of head injuries per battalion following the introduction of tin helmets they were astounded to discover that, in many instances, the number of head injuries has actually gone up rather than down. The intensity of the fighting was no different so they might easily have concluded that tin helmets were no better or were actually worse than cloth caps in protecting the soldiers. Fortunately, they realised that what was actually happening was that more soldiers were surviving hits that would have previously been fatal, turning deaths into survivable wounds.
The simplicity and effectiveness of the Brodie helmet became the inspiration and forerunner of many more modern, technologically advanced combat helmets. By the end of the war some 7.5 million Brodie helmets had been produced. And yet it might so easily have been dismissed and thousands of soldiers might never have survived.
What was being measured (head injuries) was an inverted signal of what actually mattered (deaths). It’s a pattern that repeats. Sales cycles that lengthen because you’ve stopped chasing easy-but-doomed deals. Engagement survey scores dropping after improvements in psychological safety because people finally feel able to be honest. Measures of productivity gains from AI looking only at task-level time-savings on things people were already doing and failing to measure work that wouldn’t have been attempted at all or how jobs are slowly being redrawn around what humans uniquely contribute.
Sometimes what looks like failure can actually be evidence of something else.
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Photo by Stijn Swinnen on Unsplash
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