[NamTaf]

Agreed. When I first started at my company, our graduate programme involved a ‘showcase project’ where we had to think up a problem to solve within the business.

It certainly wasn’t effective in allocating effort - most groups did a month of research only to find out why it wouldn’t work, and those ideas that were pursued were 90% dropped after the showcase presentation. However, failure had important lessons in learning about the business (10k+ people on size) and how to explore it for info.

In a few specific cases, they became genuinely useful ideas that were implemented. Mine, for example, was because it involved us as grads identifying a missing capability in one arm of the business that had been solved elsewhere, however the two arms never talked. The net result was a significant safety mechanism improvement.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, juniors lack the business understanding to vet ideas for those that may work. But I genuinely believe that giving them some rope to go and find out why their ideas don’t work, as opposed to just saying so, can be very valuable for a variety of reasons beyond just learning to logic through problems.