Learning from our failures
“By seeking and blundering we learn.” ―?Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Let me start with a confession. I hate making mistakes. I couldn’t imagine failure being a good thing in my military service and early career. Linguistically, it made no sense to me, and indeed, in my childhood home, I was not congratulated for any of my failures (to say the least).
I remain skeptical about the cult of celebrating failure. Still, I firmly believe in the benefits of a development culture and a growth mindset that focuses on acknowledging and learning from mistakes.
The cult of celebrating failure is ever more prevalent because most of us instinctively fear failure and fear admitting it. Our worries range from the rational and appropriate to the highly irrational and tragically self-fulfilling, with many instances falling somewhere in between. Most endeavors require risk-taking, so many organizations evangelize fearlessness to help their workforce overcome this default mode. To normalize failure, we over-communicate the benefits.
Some organizations go even further than that and try to hire and reward for fearlessness. The primary goal of these companies is to drive action-oriented innovation because their success depends on achieving a few grand breakthroughs. This may not be good for most recruits, and it’s essential to be mindful of the survivorship bias when we survey stories of remarkable innovators whose against-all-odds narratives often obscure the long tail of unsuccessful efforts where the risk didn’t pay off or ended badly.
What is failure?
I wish we had a better vocabulary to talk about failure (it’s even worse in Hebrew ; the word has been associated not only with lack of success but also with a description of a person who is a loser). Is it the same to lose a fortune on a failed business as to fail to cook a new recipe? Are we equally fallible if we are fired for poor performance, conduct a poor marketing campaign, or miss an important meeting?
Take the last one. When other people don’t show up on time, we tend to be much more judgmental than when we’re late. When they say, “The traffic was awful!” We think they failed to plan for it. A multitude of elements seem beyond our control when we are tardy, and we are far less likely to classify our tardiness as a failure.
Our attitude to failure also varies between domains. Earl Warren, the former chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, memorably observed, “I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people’s accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures.” In baseball, the very best hitters have a batting average between 30% to 40% (or .300 to .400 in baseball parlance), and just like we don’t expect a baseball player to hit 1000, we don’t expect basketball players to make every shot or footballers to score every penalty. But when businesspeople or politicians blunder, we are much less tolerant. We are not willing to be led by someone with a 30% success rate.
You can expect most of your experiments to fail if you work in a lab. But if you are managing a nuclear plant or guarding a President, there is at least one kind of failure you’d never be okay with.
So, how to navigate all this? A new and excellent book, The Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson , was written for this purpose and can help us be better learners, leaders, and friends. It is a book I wish was there for my parents or most working cultures a few decades ago.
In this edition, I’d like to expand on three themes informed by her ideas and my experience. I’ll also share a short coda to close. ?
Planning to fail vs failing to plan. ?
The right kind of wrong is what Thomas Edison referred to as finding ‘ways that don’t work.’ Edison said he never failed; instead, he found 10,000 ways that don’t work. Edmondson provides four attributes for what she calls intelligent failures:
In his book Creativity Inc., Pixar’s president, Ed Catmull, writes, “Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is that the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them." Moreover, the Pixar creative process is famously iterative early on and one of the best examples of acting on these four attributes. The company is renowned for its long planning and scripting periods, rigorous internal research, and a critical brain-trust group that often determines that significant parts of projects (or the entire project) work. This creative approach can initially produce a streak of failures, but it’s part of an uncompromising and constant tinkering process.? ?
There is a contradiction here; For its first two decades, Pixar was touted for its unprecedented track record of only releasing massive hits despite taking on risky and innovative projects. This is partly because of the aforementioned linguistic limitations, but the broader lesson is in Catmull’s alternative framing - that the only way to innovate is through trial and error. The lesson here is not that the more errors you make, the more likely you are to succeed. It’s more that you are stacking the odds overwhelmingly against you by obsessing about minimizing mistakes.
More generally, when the first two criteria are unambiguous (a high-risk, high rewards situation), we are used to seeing staged investment (think of venture capital or drug discovery) and expect a high failure rate in the early stages. But this advice also applies to smaller projects and various personal pursuits where we should think about the learning process as small intelligent failures (unsuccessful dates, bad interviews, lost chess games) or iterative steps towards fulfilling a successful strategy.
Polymath Michael Polanyi distinguished between formal (or explicit) knowledge and tacit (or implicit) knowledge. The former can be written down, transmitted, and understood by a diligent student, e.g., all factual data can potentially be learned by memorization. The latter can’t be transferred or acquired in the same way. Motor skills, personal wisdom, pattern recognition, and many other creative skills can only be obtained through practice and real-life experience. As I discussed in the first post of this newsletter , when trying to learn a new skill (or other forms of tacit knowledge), we are likely to discover it is more challenging than we expected and that only by persevering through periods of failure are we likely to move towards skill mastery.
This also highlights why failing to plan (i.e., breaking the 3rd attribute above) is not an intelligent failure, especially when that reflects a failure to refer to formal knowledge that is already available and would have prevented failure.
We all make mistakes, but only some of us learn from them.
There are many examples of failures that are not intrinsically worthwhile. They are simply mistakes. Yet, as they will happen often, the critical question is how to learn and not repeat them.??
Benjamin Franklin wrote that ‘wise men profit by the mistakes of others while fools do not learn even from their own blunders.’ Let’s turn to why we are prone to foolishly avoiding the opportunity to learn from our blunders.
Edmonson highlights that we are all fallible human beings (or FHBs) and will make mistakes that could have been prevented regularly. It’s how we approach them and how we learn from them that matters.
I’ve found that the most challenging aspect of this learning is dealing with negative inner chatter. If you want to manage that nagging voice, I recommend Ethan Kross 's book Chatter . “How could I be that stupid?” is a thought that pops into my head all too often. Earlier in my career, similar thoughts certainly amounted to a bad case of ‘imposter syndrome.’ I was so focused on my mistakes that I sometimes wondered if my successes were just dumb luck. When faced with this internal chatter, Kross advises us to zoom out. This is an approach which is also used in cognitive therapy. If you were advising a friend, you’d tell her she is too hard on herself, that everyone has made similar and bigger mistakes, and that her boss and colleagues will support her and maybe even be relieved that she is not ‘Ms. Perfect’.
Brené Brown ’s distinction between shame and guilt is also compelling. In this TED Talk she says, “Shame is a focus on self. Guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is ‘I am bad.’ Guilt is ‘I did something bad.’ Shame can make us feel ‘I am a mistake,’ guilt is ‘I made a mistake.’”
When our self-talk is healthy, we can see our mistakes for what they are, not more and not much less, and we are ready to take responsibility for them. We then reflect on why we made that mistake. Sometimes, it’s because we were tired or distracted, and while that’s not an excuse, it’s important context. We will be tired or distracted again, so what habits could we consider adopting that would force us to concentrate better or avoid some tasks? And perhaps there are system design changes that will help others avoid similar mistakes.
At a recent football game between Tottenham and Liverpool, the video assistant referee (VAR) was distracted momentarily, which was enough to confuse him into thinking that he was being asked to confirm that a goal scorer was onside. He was quick to report ‘check complete,’ providing such confirmation. A few seconds later, he realized that the on-field decision was offside, and he was being asked to confirm a decision to disallow a goal. His confusion led to a decisively wrong ruling. Because this was all captured on an audio recording , you can hear his nervousness as he resolves not to report his mistake (“can’t do anything” ) when he still could have. Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted this classic case of commitment bias in action. What was officially reported as ‘a serious human error’ was quickly and hyperbolically dubbed ‘VARmageddon. No doubt the official should feel guilty, but the phrase ‘check complete’ is ambiguous. A change in policy to use different words could prevent this from recurring – e.g., if he said ‘onside decision confirmed,’ the on-field team would have spotted the misunderstanding. Similarly, it can now be known that a wrong decision due to miscommunication should not be upheld, and the game should be restarted.
There are endless examples like this in any organization, which is why Edmondson says it’s essential to encourage and reward reporting errors. Errors should be reported even when corrected in time, by luck, or when the mistake didn’t cause harm. Finally, a culture that encourages reporting should naturally expect false alarms (thinking an error was made when it wasn’t) and never disparage them. This links directly to Edmondson’s ground-breaking work on psychological safety, showing that the more errors that are being reported, the better performance is over time, as teams learn from them and support each other better in real-time.
Blameless reporting and a generous attitude towards people when they make mistakes should not imply any willingness to lower standards. On the contrary, it is about the commitment to learn from errors individually and organizationally, which allows us to reach and maintain higher standards. This is also why feedback culture is so vital, but that’s a topic for another day. ?
Equity, empathy, trust, and avoiding malicious envy.
American scientist Jared Diamond and others have used the Anna Karenina principle to suggest that every failure, like every unhappy family, is unique. Diamond wanted to underscore that countless factors can prevent success, a concept John List applied nicely to explain why so many ideas fail to scale.
We can add how we process, admit, and forgive our failures differently than how we respond to others’ follies and misfortune, along with how we may judge others according to how much we care about them or identify with them to a plethora of unconscious biases influencing how we think about failure. Simply put, second chances are not equally available. The consequences of paying the price of failure can be a lot harsher for those who had to work harder to get a rarefied educational or work opportunity.
The idea that success and failure are determined by merit is a decent aspiration, but we should not confuse aspiration with the reality around us. Furthermore, to promote equity, we must exercise empathy. We must study the context and the circumstances before we rush to judgment. As we do so, we may discover a lot is going on that we didn’t know about, which may have affected performance. After all, we see only the tip of an iceberg. To go back to the distracted video referee, he failed in his job, but this could have been a tough day in his life for various reasons that we cannot know about without asking him. ?
Being vulnerable and open about our failures contributes to psychological safety and the establishment of trust. When other people learn more about our iceberg, they will share more about theirs, and we are likely to make better judgments about each other when it might matter.
Trust doesn’t mean unquestioning loyalty, especially between a boss and her team. Her team should trust that she will assume positive intent , inquire about the broader context, consider the track record, and determine the appropriate consequences. She may decide to take someone out of the team (or out of the company). When it’s a considered decision after multiple chances and honest feedback, it is probably better for the person not to delay the inevitable. He may be able to thrive more elsewhere. This, too, is how high standards are upheld.
Edmondson also references recent work from her colleague at Harvard Business School, Alison Wood Brooks which looked at how successful people can mitigate the malicious envy their success incites in others by revealing their failures. Malicious envy is a destructive interpersonal emotion, as people get caught up in social comparison and start to wish harm or enjoy their troubles (a feeling uniquely captured in the German word Schadenfreude).
So, remember that as hard as it is to admit failures (past and present), in one vulnerable swoop, you can cultivate psychological safety and trust and make others feel less shame and envy. You must be authentic, take responsibility, and offer a sincere and effective apology .
Coda: many failures are not a guarantee of pending success. To the contrary.
“Do not fear failure, but please, be terrified of regret.” Deshauna Barber-Echols is the first soldier to become Miss USA. She shared this wisdom when she eloquently told the story of her many losses that preceded her pageant victory. Persisting in the face of many failures is often described – with the benefit of hindsight– as an inevitable rite of passage. There is a thin line between grit and inability to learn from failure. Harry Potter books didn’t succeed proportionately to the number of rejections JK Rowling received, just as Spanx didn’t because of Sara Blakely 's countless rejections. It is the survivorship bias again – in most cases, many rejections led to a dead end.
We must decide where to draw the line between trying hard and trying too hard. This starts with a deep reflection on the causes of the small and significant failures in our lives. It continues as we tease out the distinctions between intelligent failures and other preventable and undesirable mistakes. I hope this edition of the newsletter helps you persist with the former and minimize the latter.