The groundskeepers I just mentioned did a project on edging blades. They felt that a more-expensive edging blade would be Leaner (cheaper per foot of edging and less effort to use). So we bought the expensive cutting blade, but it turned out that their old cheap blade performed about the same as the expensive blade. To compound the problem the cheap one could be sharpened but the expensive one had special steel alloys and a shape that couldn't be sharpened. So it was clearly Leaner and cheaper to use the cheaper blade.

The team felt really bad. They felt bad because their project had failed. I said that I considered it to be a completely successful project, because it gave us information about the process or product that we didn't have before, and we now had a new basis for thinking about things. People were much more conscious of the whole blade issue after that than they were before. So, a good project might be successful even if it has a negative result. The next time a new blade comes out, they can give it a try and test it against their benchmark.