What is validated learning?
Validation is the act of making a prediction about the future and confirming whether (or not) it is true (all confirmation takes an amount of time so all predictions are about the future).
Reliability is about something that has been validated in the past (i.e. it worked multiple times in the past). The “inductive fallacy” is that you assume something that has been true in the past (reliable) is going to be true tomorrow (valid).
The distinction is important for businesses because it is easy to fall back on “old reliable” because it is just that - reliable. All good things come to an end however, and if you have not developed the skills of making and testing hypothesis for their validity you will have no answer. For example at one point in history selling movies on VHS tapes was reliable, as was owning a large chain of retail stores that allowed you to rent them.
Validated learning was introduced by Eric Ries and describes the process of validating business ideas against real customers. Learning is a difficult thing to measure, and Ries points out that in innovative ventures learning is more important than optimising early stage metrics. Why? Early stage innovations need to prove lots of things, not only that they are profitable, but that the market is large enough, that you can acquire customers through profitable funnels etc.
Validated learning can be measured as it produces outputs i.e. metrics to track if your hypothesis was valid.
The problem with validation is there is a chance that you are incorrect and it is not valid. This information is still valuable, as you have learnt more about customers and the demand - but in poor business cultures this is looked on as a failure. The old phrase “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” originates from it being a reliable choice with little perceived risk.
Innovative business cultures reward validated learning - they reward experimentation itself - not whether it was successful or not. Businesses that lack this culture put a lot of weight on things that used to be reliable, still being reliable.