Learning to Fail Forward
This week on the Next Big Idea podcast -- Amy Edmondson on the art of intelligent failure. Listen on Apple or Spotify and let us know what you think in the comments below.
We’ve all heard that we should embrace failure. Failure is just a signal, after all … it's just information. If we want to be good little scientists, we must test quickly and often and take the good and bad without prejudice.
Adam Grant once described to me a conversation he had with Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize winning economist. Kahneman described the realization that he was wrong about something, and his face lit up with child-like wonder. Why? Because it is only when he is wrong that he knows he is learning. I have not yet arrived at this state of ecstatic delight in my wrongness, but now that I have listened to my friend Michael Kovnat's conversation with Amy Edmondson , I aspire to it.
Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, and author of the new book Right Kind of Wrong , has spent decades studying how organizations and individuals respond to failure. Her conclusion? Failures aren’t created equal. There’s a right way and a wrong way to fail. The key is failing intelligently by viewing failures as learning opportunities, not verdicts on our abilities.?
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Edmondson identifies three main types of failure:
Rather than beating ourselves up over basic failures, Edmondson advises cultivating psychological safety so we feel comfortable admitting and reporting mistakes quickly. For complex failures, we need to encourage people to speak up about weak signals and listen to dissenting voices.?
But it’s intelligent failures that present the most opportunity for growth, if we create the right conditions. We need to explore new territory, stay focused on learning, and fail small so we can iterate rapidly.
In this week’s episode of “The Next Big Idea,” Edmondson sits down with my friend and NBIC co-founder, Michael Kovnat, he of the mellifluous baritone, to share stories of pioneering inventors and athletic superstars, and help us put these concepts in action.
One conclusion I have come to after listening to this conversation is that I prefer environments in which failure is not catastrophic. You don't want me operating on you, or flying your 737. But the world of ideas? Digital media? Podcasting? Where we can try things and fail (and edit) and learn? That is my happy place. I don't think I am alone in this preference (as much as we appreciate the great work done by our surgeons and pilots, who go to great lengths to minimize failure -- thank you for that!). High failure environments -- true of sports and video games and learning language in a foreign country in which you don't know anyone who speaks English -- are fast learning environments. The pace of failure and the pace of learning seem to be correlated. And learning is fun. I have a hunch we we will all be happier if we get robots doing the stuff where failure is catastrophic (they will be better than we are at it) and we can all play and fail and learn. What do you think?