The path to truly new, never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way.

Dugan frames failure not as an aberration but as a structural feature of genuine innovation. If the goal is “truly new” work—projects without established playbooks—then missteps, dead ends, and prototypes that don’t pan out are expected evidence that one is operating at the frontier rather than merely optimizing the familiar. The quote also implies a cultural prescription: organizations and individuals who want breakthrough results must tolerate, learn from, and even budget for failure, treating it as iterative feedback. In this view, the real risk is not failing, but avoiding ambitious experiments and thereby forfeiting the possibility of unprecedented outcomes.