We often hear that we should embrace failure, instead of fearing it. That advice is exciting, bold, and empowering.
I also think it is a mistake.
The idea of embracing failure is unrealistic. In many work and educational settings, failure counts against you, and may even cost you a job or promotion.
The advice is also counter-productive. It can encourage recklessness and excessive risks.
Just because someone has battle scars doesn’t mean that the person has gained expertise. Those battle scars may indicate that the person is a poor decision-maker, unable to adapt and compromise. That's nothing to be proud of.
Nevertheless, failures serve some purpose; the advice to embrace failures isn’t all misguided. We need to look at the ways that failures can serve us.
I have thought about failure since I was a guest on Stephen Dubner’s show Freakonomics about failure.
Emotional reactions
The advice to embrace failure can help people reduce their fear of failure, which is useful—fears can paralyze people or make them overly risk-averse.
Yet I worry that people might get too desensitized to failure, and casually brush off their failures.
Painful as it may sound, I think people are better off thinking about failures. I think failures should burn. They should cause the person to think about what went wrong. I speak from personal experience. When I have failed, I am pretty miserable. I never want to engage in certain activities again—a lecture or a workshop. I reflect on what happened and can identify what I should have done differently. And at that point, I can’t wait for another chance. I wouldn’t have reached those insights if I had shrugged the failure off.
If the people in an organization are too risk-averse and too afraid of failure, we can offer a contrast between downside risk and upside risk. I heard about this contrast during a project I did for a large financial management company. When the analysts pondered whether to invest in a particular company, they knew that that company might run into trouble, or perhaps even go out of business. If that happened, the financial management firm would have lost its entire investment, but no more than that. However, if they failed to invest and the company took off, perhaps tripling in value or more, they would lose this opportunity. This was an upside risk. The upside risks could be much greater than the downside risks. That perspective kept the financial management company on the hunt. They feared missing the big opportunities more than they feared losing their entire stake.
Another way to counter risk aversion is to rekindle the enthusiasm for the project. Team members and outside evaluators can become so obsessed with what might go wrong that they forget about the upside of a project—what might go right. I have described a pre-mortem method that identifies risks, but I have also described a counter-exercise to promote excitement.
Cognitive reactions
Failures can upgrade our mental models, deleting or qualifying some of the simplistic beliefs restricting us. Failures do a better job than successes because successes don’t motivate us to re-examine our beliefs, whereas failures prompt us to think critically about our assumptions. Especially if we let the failures burn at us.
But there is a caveat: We will get more from the failures if we can accurately diagnose what went wrong. We will get more if we can make sense of the feedback. That’s why the advice to embrace failure seems shallow. It doesn’t encourage us to sort out what went wrong. Failure itself doesn’t promote changes in mental models. It doesn’t automatically promote learning.
Failures provide feedback, but it is outcome feedback. Our actions didn’t work. We still have to sort out why they didn’t work. Process feedback is more effective than outcome feedback, but failures usually don’t include any process feedback—information about the strengths and weaknesses of how we performed the actions. And process feedback itself is often ambiguous and confusing. Furthermore, people are prone to distort feedback in various ways. Even when a failure provides clear feedback, we might never have noticed the important cues, rendering the feedback meaningless.
Conclusion
We can learn a lot from failures. However, the learning is not automatic. The learning depends on our ability to diagnose why we failed. That diagnosis can be painful, but failure itself is painful. Making sense of the failure allows us to grow.
References
For a more detailed coverage of the limits of feedback, see Chapter 11 of Streetlights and Shadows.
Freakonomics, “How to Succeed at Failing,” aired October/November 2023.
Klein, G. (2009). Streetlights and shadows: Searching for the keys to adaptive decision making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
International Journal of Technology and Design Education. Learning from failure: A systematized review. March 2021.
Making the Most of a Failure
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13.03.2024
We often hear that we should embrace failure, instead of fearing it. That advice is exciting, bold, and empowering.
I also think it is a mistake.
The idea of embracing failure is unrealistic. In many work and educational settings, failure counts against you, and may even cost you a job or promotion.
The advice is also counter-productive. It can encourage recklessness and excessive risks.
Just because someone has battle scars doesn’t mean that the person has gained expertise. Those battle scars may indicate that the person is a poor decision-maker, unable to adapt and compromise. That's nothing to be proud of.
Nevertheless, failures serve some purpose; the advice to embrace failures isn’t all misguided. We need to look at the ways that failures can serve us.
I have thought about failure since I was a guest on Stephen Dubner’s show Freakonomics about failure.
Emotional reactions
The advice to embrace failure can help people reduce their fear of failure, which is useful—fears can paralyze people or make them overly risk-averse.
Yet I worry that people might get too desensitized to failure, and casually brush off their failures.
Painful as it may sound, I think people are better off........
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