April 1, 2011
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Failure is all the rage right now. Harvard Business Review has devoted an issue to it. The blogosphere is ripe with multiple treatments. The mantra of "fail fast" is quickly becoming a rallying cry for innovation. With all the ballyhoo, though, we should keep in mind that failure is not, or shouldn't be, the goal. The goal should be to learn, because learning comes before improvement. Failure is simply an implicit element in creating new knowledge—a.k.a. learning.
Suppose I asked you, "What would you attempt if you knew you couldn't fail?" How would you answer?
It’s a trick question, because you can’t fail in the attempt, only in the outcome. When the goal itself is to try, there’s no failure. It’s just that the test comes before the lesson.
Think of your most powerful, most meaningful learning experience. Unless I miss my guess, it probably didn't involve overwhelming success, but rather a difficult struggle and a good bit of failure.
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And if you think about it, our most intensive learning period, from birth to about five years old, features failure upon failure: learning to sit up, crawl, walk, talk...everything is an experiment. Nothing happens right the first time, and what we now call failure was not at that time thought of or labeled as failure. Instead, it was a continuous cycle of learning and progressing and improving—a natural part of growing up.
The next time you see an infant in a high chair throwing food on the floor, know that you’re watching a learning cycle in action. She’s wondering what will happen if she drops her strained carrots. The problem is how to get them on the ground. She could tip her dish over the tray, flick her spoon or grab a fistful and toss away. She tries the tip. It works. Great feedback from the dish as it crashes on the tile. She confirms her test by doing it again after Mom picks it up. It works so well she adopts it as her interim best practice. Lesson learned, though: Mom isn't happy about it and Dad has to get involved. So she launches another experiment.
She is learning in the most human and natural and powerful way: experiencing cause and effect first-hand. Implicit in the example is the conscious problem-solving cycle all humans employ: No. 1, questioning; No. 2, hypothesizing; No. 3, experimenting; No. 4, reflecting.
Everything starts with a question, which triggers an investigation and information-gathering effort. How can I do that better? That leads to the definition of a problem to be analyzed and solved. The search for possible answers to your question entails generating ideas, solutions and corrective measures. By experimenting with one or more of the solutions, trying different things—many of which won't work at all—the most appropriate and effective is discovered. You then reflect on your experiments, observing your own thinking and actions. What worked, what didn't, and why? (Understanding what doesn't work is just as important as understanding what does.) This in turn stimulates further questions, commencing the learning cycle again.
We only talk about failure because of the prevailing emotion it evokes: fear. So where did that fear come from? It wasn't there when we were toddling about, coming to grips with the world. Where did our playful fearlessness and childlike curiosity go?
It disappeared at the hands of our institutional education as we grew up. The first phase of problem-solving—questioning—got replaced by another activity: answering. Learning became not about creating new knowledge, but about acquiring existing knowledge. Teachers asked the questions, and we had to answer correctly. There was a right and wrong answer, and a grade called "F," for failure, became prominently placed on our report card, and along with it came the fear factor. Unfortunately, the focus on answering transferred over to the workplace, where the focus became getting the right answer for the boss. And failure was not an option if we wanted to advance our career.
In one sense, there really is no failure in the natural learning cycle. Ever wonder why pilot projects never fail while big, but change-the-world projects almost always do? It’s because the goal of any pilot is to learn. So you can’t help but succeed. It’s the difference between movies and TV. Movie producers develop the final product with a bet-it-all-gambit, relying on past experience as the key input. It's a risky, risky venture, because there is no chance to test and adjust in a meaningful way. But TV producers always pilot a new series with a few episodes to gauge the audience response before going in whole-hog.
Please don't focus on failure. Failure will happen on its own if you're doing the right thing. Focus on the beta test, the prototype. Focus on the experiment, the attempt. Focus on learning and improving, and failure will occur quite naturally.
Charles Kettering perhaps said it best: "Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. The only time you don't want to fail is the last time you try something. One fails toward success."
To my mind, all we really have to do is get back in touch with how we came into the world.
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Julie Rains 1 year 1 months and 27 days ago
Great insight on failure as a consequence (an acceptable one on the path to learning and innovation) rather than as a goal itself.