How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency

Everyone makes mistakes. How do you learn from them? Lessons from the classroom, the Air Force, and the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Part of the series “How to Succeed at Failing.”?

This article comes from?Freakonomics Radio.?You can listen and follow our weekly podcast on?Apple Podcasts,?Spotify, or?elsewhere.

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If I asked you to name the world’s deadliest infectious disease, what would you say? Covid-19? That was the biggest infectious killer for a few years, but not anymore. How about malaria? Influenza? H.I.V.? Those are all deadly —?but not the deadliest. So what’s number one?

Babak JAVID: Actually, TB for the last 20, 30 years has been the No. 1 infectious-disease killer in the world.

Babak Javid is a physician-scientist who studies tuberculosis, or TB. You may think of TB as a 19th-century disease, when it was called consumption. It killed John Keats, Anton Chekov, and at least two of the Bront? sisters; it killed the heroines of both La Bohème and La Traviata. And today, it still kills around 1.5 million people each year, most of them in the developing world.

JAVID: TB is a disease of poverty. It’s really a major problem in India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, Nigeria.

TB is a bacterial infection. There is a vaccine for it, but it’s not always effective. It can be treated with antibiotics, but it’s a long and fairly complicated course of treatment. And as deadly as TB is, it doesn’t draw the attention — or the funding — that flow to other diseases.

JAVID: There is no Hollywood star that gets TB that puts it in the public mind, in everyday people’s thoughts. One of the reasons I was attracted to this field is I felt that infectious diseases in general and TB in particular is one of the mechanisms of injustice in our world. And I really wanted to tackle that.

Javid runs a tuberculosis research lab at the University of California San Francisco. He has also worked at labs in Beijing and at Harvard. His kind of research comes with a lot of failure.

JAVID: I remember in my graduate school, I went over a year and a half without a single experiment working, and it’s very hard to get up in the morning and go back and expect to fail again.

The first drug that was found to successfully fight TB is called streptomycin. It was discovered in 1943; it won a Nobel Prize for Selman Waksman, the main scientist behind it.

JAVID: And the way that streptomycin works is that it does two things. It inhibits the process of making new proteins — it’s called a protein-synthesis inhibitor — but that in itself doesn’t kill the bug. What kills the bug is that in addition to that inhibitory action, it actually causes the bug to make mistakes when it makes these proteins.?

What interested Javid was this second function: the drug causing the bacteria to make mistakes as they’re creating the proteins that produce the symptoms of TB. So he went looking for other ways to trigger those mistakes. And he found some —?but it turned out this wasn’t enough to thwart the bacteria.

JAVID: What was really shocking and surprising to me is the bug didn’t seem to mind. It just carried on regardless. So I cranked up the error rate, and I kept pushing and pushing, and really the bugs were kind of fine with it until eventually when I had really cranked up the error rate an awful lot. Then, the bugs died. It takes a lot of error to kill these bugs. I was reflecting on my results and I was thinking, this just doesn’t make any sense to me. The prevailing dogma at the time is that with a small amount of error, you induce what’s called error catastrophe where the errors and the new proteins make faulty machinery in the cell that then makes more errors, and it just feeds on itself. And these bugs were extremely resilient. And that made me, take a step back. And I thought: what if, actually, these errors aren’t detrimental after all, at least in a moderate amount? And that was my, I guess, “aha” moment. I have to be honest, at the beginning, I had no idea why this was. We were coming up with lots of different ideas as to explain it. But after a lot of experimentation and blind alleys and wrong turns, we figured out that what’s happening is that this mistranslation is allowing the bacteria to innovate. And that was a really exciting moment. And I kind of coined the term “adaptive mistranslation,” that sometimes these errors in the right context and in the right degree can actually be good for the bug.?

“Adaptive mistranslation”: think about that for a minute. And let’s think about it outside the realm of tuberculosis research: it’s the idea that errors —?in the right context and degree —?can strengthen an organism, can make it more resilient and lead it to innovate. Now, that sounds like a magic trick, doesn’t it? But, if it can work for TB, can it work for us? Today on Freakonomics Radio, the final episode of our series “How to Succeed at Failing.” We’ll hear about another counterintuitive way to fight off failure:

Gary KLEIN: The pre-mortem is designed to help you do better rather than to shut off innovation.

We ask if failure should be taught, formally, in the classroom??

Theresa MACPHAIL: The whole point of the whole semester is going to be: hey everybody fails, and we fail at everything.?

And whether failure needs a museum:

Samuel WEST: We have a Ford Edsel. We have Pepsi Crystal. New Coke.

“How to Succeed at Failing,” the final chapter. Starting right now.?

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Gary Klein is a cognitive psychologist who advises organizations on how to respond to failure. His latest research is around what are called “wicked problems.”

KLEIN: A wicked problem is one where there’s not a clear right answer that people would generally agree upon.

In any of those conflicts that Klein is describing — any of those disruptions, let’s call them —?we suddenly crash into a complex situation that’s also fogged in by uncertainty. Now we have to essentially guess what’s going to happen next —?and those guesses often turn out to be wrong.

MACPHAIL: I actually went on Anderson Cooper during the early days of the pandemic to tell everyone how wrong I was.

That is Theresa MacPhail. She is a medical anthropologist at the Stevens Institute of Technology, one of the country’s top engineering colleges. And yes, MacPhail is an appropriate name for a professor discussing her own failure in a series about failure —?but just wait, it will get even more appropriate later in this episode. Anyway, MacPhail had studied the outbreak of the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, so her expertise was in demand when Covid came along.

MACPHAIL: I really thought when we heard the first rumblings out of China in 2019 and early 2020, I was like, “We have this. Like, there’s mechanisms in place.” But what I hadn’t really considered was what over a decade of cutting funding had done. And it had basically decimated a lot of public health. I thought we were more prepared, and it turns out we were not. And I felt badly because I had done an interview with Vice News in February, and I said, “Calm down. We’re not China. We’re better equipped, here is why.” I had to go to the E.R. in March because I got very sick. On March 1st, I went to the E.R., and I remember the E.R. doctor saying to me that he had never seen a situation where they were so ill-equipped with P.P.E., or personal protective equipment. That’s when I realized, “Uh-oh, I was wrong.”

Now, what might have happened if Theresa MacPhail — and not just MacPhail, but let’s say everyone in the realm of pandemic-preparedness —?what if they had all thought a bit differently about this wicked problem? What if, before the failure happened, they pretended there had already been a failure? You’re probably familiar with the idea of a post-mortem, or what the military calls an “after-action review.” By that point, of course, the damage has been done. So what if you flip the order, and conduct a pre-mortem? That’s what Gary Klein called this strategy when he invented it in the 1980s.

KLEIN: The pre-mortem is designed to help people surface realistic possibilities and threats so that you can improve the plan, improve the product, and increase your chance of success.?

At the time, Klein was running an R&D firm that studied decision-making in organizations.

KLEIN: Many of our projects succeeded, but not all of them. And we would occasionally have an after-action review. Those weren’t exciting things to do, because we were pretty disgruntled. At one point, I said, “Why don’t we do this at the very beginning? Why don’t we imagine that it fails?” Often in organizations, if you have a kickoff meeting, there’ll be a part where they say, “All right, now does anybody have any concerns? Are there any critiques? Does anybody see any problems?” And nobody says anything — either because they don’t want to disrupt the harmony of the team, or because they’re not thinking that anything could go wrong, because they’re excited to get started. So, to break through that mindset, I developed this technique of a pre-mortem. And at the end of a kickoff meeting, we say, “All right, imagine that I’m looking at a crystal ball. I’m dialing forward six months, maybe a year, whatever the right time frame is. And — oh, no. This project has failed. It’s failed in a big way. We know that, there is no doubt. This crystal ball is infallible. Now, everybody in the room, you’ve got two minutes. Write down all the reasons why this project failed.” And it’s amazing, the types of issues that people surface that ordinarily they wouldn’t say in public, or even think about.?

That was a no. Coming up, we ask the C.E.O. of a startup if he would like to try Gary Klein’s pre-mortem idea.

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In 2018, Will Coleman left his job as a partner at McKinsey, the consulting firm, in order to launch a rideshare startup called Alto. We spoke with him earlier this year.

COLEMAN: At Alto, we’re elevating rideshare for both drivers and passengers. We offer a really differentiated service through W-2 employees and company-owned vehicles. So, at Alto, you always know exactly what you’re going to get: a safe, clean, high-quality ride, every single time.?

The rideshare market is tough to break into. Uber and Lyft dominate both the drivers and the riders in most places. Coleman hopes that Alto’s business model can set it apart. Instead of using freelance drivers who have their own cars, which is how Lyft and Uber do it, Alto employs the drivers directly and leases vehicles from manufacturers. Will that work? The history of the rideshare industry is already littered with firms that tried to challenge Uber and Lyft: Juno, Sidecar, Fasten, and more. We asked Gary Klein how he might help Alto stay off that list.

KLEIN: Okay, so there’s a couple of things that I might do with them. First of all, we would want to run some pre-mortems, to inject a healthy dose of reality — not that I don’t think they have that. A second is: are they going to be able to pivot based on what they learn? Or are they going to get locked into a business model, and not be resilient or flexible as things develop? Because things will develop. Their plan is not going to continue as they’ve originally designed it, simply because nobody is smart enough to come up with a perfect plan right off the bat. So you do want to make discoveries, and you do want to be able to pivot and maybe even make massive changes in your business model. I mean, if you do some sort of pre-mortem, you might say, “What are the things that we might have to adapt for?” in part to build a more resilient organization.

We went back to Will Coleman to ask what he thinks of Gary Klein’s suggestion.

COLEMAN: Yeah, we’re not going to be running any pre-mortems at Alto.

A couple months after we spoke with Coleman, we learned that Alto shut down service in San Francisco, after just a year. They also made some significant layoffs, and they paused their plans to expand beyond their current cities. Does this mean they’ll join the 90-some percent of failed startups that Coleman mentioned? I, of course, have no way of knowing. But if they do fail, and fail spectacularly, they might end up with this man:

WEST: Hi. My name is Samuel West. I’m a psychologist and I’m a curator.?

He is a curator and founder of The Museum of Failure. And how did that come to be?

WEST: So I was in Croatia, in Zagreb, the capital, just on holiday with my family. And I stumbled into a museum called the Museum of Broken Relationships. So, I’d been thinking about ways to sort of spread the ideas of accepting failure, and how much room for improvement there is on learning from failure. And then I was in Zagreb and I just got this — what do you call it? Hallelujah moment.?

And so it was that Samuel West invented the Museum of Failure. It’s a pop-up museum that has been traveling the world since 2017: Helsingborg, Sweden; Paris; Los Angeles; as of this recording, it’s in Washington, D.C. We caught up with West this past spring, when his museum was in Brooklyn.

WEST: It’s a sunny, nice day, and we’re about to open in a few minutes.

As it turns out, running a traveling museum is not easy.

WEST: So here we have an example of failure at Museum of Failure. Our wall panels are falling off the wall. I’m going to kill somebody.

The museum includes more than 150 failures, most of them inventions and commercial products; they range from trivial to fraudulent.

WEST: Elizabeth Holmes. Do I need to say anything about her? No, come on. Gerber, back in the ’70s, they launched a product of adult food in a baby food jar. This is the UroClub, from 2008.?

In case you didn’t hear that, it’s called the UroClub. Not “Euro,” E-U-R-O, just U-R-O.

WEST: It’s a golf club with — yeah, it’s for us men when we’re out golfing and, uh, need to urinate. So what you do is you unscrew the top of it. You clip it on your belt, and then you fiddle under the belt and you urinate into this canister camouflaged as a golf club, and then you screw it back up and you continue on with your golf. I mean, the criteria is that to be in the museum, it has to be an innovation and it has to be a failure, obviously. And then I have to find it interesting.

The Museum of Failure will make you laugh; but West hopes that people walk away with more than that.?

WEST: So, the focus at the museum is on innovations, which is products and services. But in our personal lives we fail also. And the same principle applies there. We’re very bad at learning from our own failures because it’s uncomfortable. So if we’re willing to have those uncomfortable feelings and thoughts for a while, we can actually learn from them. I want people to feel liberated, that failing isn’t as bad as you think it is, usually.?

We also got Samuel West into a studio, to talk about failure more generally.

WEST: I think failure is far more interesting than success.?

So if someone is interested in learning from failure, what are some mechanisms to help with that? Throughout this series, we’ve spoken with Amy Edmondson, a scholar of failure at the Harvard Business School; she argues that, for starters, we should not be hiding our failures.

Amy EDMONDSON: One way to think about this is, we will be failing, so let’s do it joyfully. Let’s do it thoughtfully. And celebrate them appropriately.

Okay, so that’s one vote for a journal of failure — but Edmondson doesn’t want to run it. Maybe we can persuade this person.

Roy SHALEM: My name is Roy Shalem. I have a Ph.D. in economics.?

Shalem teaches at Tel Aviv University and studies the economics of competition and regulation. He once published a paper called “The Market for R&D Failures.”

SHALEM: So what I’m trying to analyze is a situation in which firms are competing head-to-head in a certain kind of a patent race.

Patent races are quite common; think about when pharmaceutical firms are competing to find a disease treatment. But this goes way beyond pharma companies.

SHALEM: One of the most famous examples is when Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both filed a patent for the telephone on the same day in 1876. Bell won the patent, started this successful company, now synonymous with telephone, while far fewer people remember Gray.?

A typical patent race is winner-take-all. The competitors work hard, invest a lot of resources, but only the winner reaps the rewards. And the loser, or losers, are left with pretty much nothing. Roy Shalem, based on his research around corporate innovation, thinks this model is due for an upgrade. He thinks the losers should also have a way to monetize their efforts.

SHALEM: My paper proves that theoretically there is a potential for a market for R&D failure. When you sell knowledge of past failures, you are expected both to reduce the cost of R&D because you’re not doing the same mistakes over and over again, and you also reduce the time until a discovery is made. So that’s also worth money.

If Shalem had his way, there would be —?as he titled his paper —?a true market for R&D failures.

SHALEM: Basically, when you’re doing something which is very hard, you mostly produce failures. And this is a very, very important part of the stock of knowledge. And so I think that it is possible to take all that knowledge and find the right price for a competitor to buy that knowledge.?

So far, at least, such a market does not exist. Nor does our academic journal of failure. So what else can we do if we want to seriously consider the idea of learning from failure? Maybe we learn from failure in the old-fashioned way: in a classroom.

MACPHAIL: I mean, I’m old-school. I’m talking about Hobbes.

Coming up: Failure 101.

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Do you remember Theresa MacPhail? She’s the medical anthropologist who initially thought that Covid-19 wouldn’t be a big deal.

MACPHAIL: I said, “Calm down. We’re not China. We’re better-equipped, here’s why.”

MacPhail’s day job is teaching undergraduate engineering students at Stevens Institute of Technology.

MACPHAIL: They’re all science and technology nerds and geeks, and I mean that in the best possible sense — my people. Very driven, very type-A personalities. I mean, you don’t get into science and tech lightly. It’s not an easy subject, and the course load is quite hefty. At some point in their lives, probably the majority of like, say, 70 percent will probably go on to get some sort of master’s or Ph.D.

So MacPhail got to thinking about whether there was a better way to talk to her students about failure — a more direct way.

MACPHAIL: I know that business schools already teach case studies in failures, like they’ll teach what happened to Enron, what happened to WeWork. And that’s great for business students, but that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to really get them familiar with the concept of failure, and introduce it as a necessary and natural part of life and as a crucial component of a well-lived life.?

And she felt the stakes were high —?higher than most of us are willing to admit.

MACPHAIL: Around 2017, 2018, we had a year that had several suicides. And we’re not alone. You pick up the newspaper, and you’re reading constantly about, Penn, Yale, Cornell — I mean you name a school and they’re having a suicide problem. And one of the students who committed suicide in 2018 was my student, one of my students in a class that I had. She was active. She was involved heavily in Amnesty International, which is how she came to me, because she took my global health class. She was very interested in helping others. She was cheery. She was a pleasure to be around. There were none of these signs, when she was in my classroom at least, of outward struggle. So I really felt blindsided when I heard that she had committed suicide. And I had heard from friends of multiple students who had committed suicide in that same time frame, that one of the things they were all worried about is that they were somehow going to screw up, that they had screwed up, that college was the last good years, and then everything else was just going to be a series of failure. And I thought, my God, what is happening? And so as a professor, you know, I’m teaching — and I teach depressing classes, let me just be honest about this. I teach about things that can hurt us. I teach about pandemics, I teach about illnesses, I teach medicine, which is all about disease and death. And so my classes are pretty depressing. And I thought: what can I do to make a difference or just provide a different perspective to try to help all of this anxiety?

And that’s when Theresa MacPhail started teaching a course she calls Failure 101.

MACPHAIL: So I start off the class with the ultimate failure, which is death. I really think I’m an intellectual granddaughter of Ernest Becker, who famously wrote The Denial of Death. He was an anthropologist as well and his take was that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, that we defiantly create meaning where none exists because we do not want to deal with the terror that the ultimate mistake is one that’s going to get us killed. I start off the class saying, listen, life is terrifying because death is terrifying. And I think evolutionarily, mistakes meant catastrophe. And that’s probably why we don’t like them. Because if you make a wrong move in the savannah when you’re hunting, you’re dead.

I went back to Amy Edmondson, the failure expert at Harvard, to ask what she would like to see taught in a Failure 101 class.

EDMONDSON: Number one: distinguishing different kinds of failure. A failure is not a failure is not a failure. You know, we could be talking about a little mistake. We could be talking about a catastrophic accident. We could be talking about a scientific hypothesis that didn’t get supported. So, providing the students that useful terminology and that useful clarity. And then I think a second element that I’d love to see in the course is experimentation best practices, right? How do you think about good experiments versus not good experiments?

Here’s what Theresa MacPhail writes in her Failure 101 syllabus: “Some assignments will intentionally be set up for you to fail to complete them in full. But I expect you to cope with this as best you can and turn in something. I will not warn you which weeks are impossible to complete.” MacPhail has now taught the course four times. The only grades she gives are an A for passing, or an F for failing. I asked how many students have gotten an F.

MACPHAIL: Only one person. They stopped doing the reflections entirely. And I had no evidence that they were still engaged. I was more concerned about that person’s mental health, to be honest.?

MacPhail says she has gotten positive feedback from students, their parents, and, according to some students, their therapists. She would like to see her course taught at other schools.

MACPHAIL: I think they should offer a Failure 101 course because it works. It changes the students’ perspectives on failure. It makes them embrace it. It completely alters their understanding of themselves in relationship to the norm. And I think that’s worth it.

I’d like to thank Theresa MacPhail for teaching all of us a new way to think about failure. And thanks to everyone who’s been speaking with us these past four episodes about “How to Succeed at Failing.” I’m curious to know how you think we did, with this series; one key ingredient of learning from failure is getting good feedback, and I want yours. Our email is [email protected]. You can also leave a rating or review on your podcast app.

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Freakonomics Radio?is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by?Zack Lapinski?and mixed by?Greg Rippin,?with help from?Jeremy Johnston. Our staff also includes?Alina Kulman, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Jasmin Klinger, Julie Kanfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Ryan Kelley,?and?Sarah Lilley.?Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by?Luis Guerra.