Embracing failure is a great path for growth
I have been thinking about errors, mistakes and failures ever since I traded my first stock decades ago. Good traders expect to be wrong, but that attitude is surprisingly rare in business. That is a shame, because having a healthy outlook on failure would benefit just about everyone.
We shall dispense with the usual tired tales. Instead, let’s consider how we can better incorporate data into our processes, open versus closed approaches — and how we can learn to fail better.
The high stakes involved make aviation an excellent subject for the study of failure. In other fields, errors might be subtle and the results not recognized for years. When there is a flying failure, planes fall out of the sky, and footage of the wreckage is on the evening news.
Matthew Syed points this out in “Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes (But Some Do).” Aviation is an open, data-rich system, with statistics going back a century: In 1912, the U.S. Army had 14 pilots, and even before the war, more than half (eight) would die in crashes.
The Army set up an aviation school, to teach pilots how to fly more successfully. Unfortunately, the school had a 25 percent mortality rate.
Fast-forward a century. Syed observed that in 2013, there were 36.4 million commercial flights worldwide carrying 3 billion passengers. That year, there were only 210 commercial aviation fatalities. For some context, 1 million flights resulted in 0.41 accidents. In 2017, zero commercial airline passengers died.
That is an astounding improvement over the course of a century.
How did the industry achieve this? By being self-critical and learning from accidents. Every accident, every crash (or near miss) gets studied extensively. The Federal Aviation Administration requires all large commercial aircraft to have a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder to create a comprehensive and objective data set to allow for the full study of failure.
Compare this with a closed system, like health care and hospitals. Syed notes the remarkable contrast between air travel and preventable medical errors, which might result in as many as a half-million deaths in the U.S. at a cost estimated at $17 billion a year. After heart disease and cancer, medical errors are the No. 3 cause of death in America.
Why is health care so different from aviation? First, there is little publicly available data and no sort of standardized review process when errors occur. Whatever self-examination takes place is private and is sealed and not readily available for public scrutiny.
When Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed in March 2008, it wasn’t merely a harbinger of the coming financial crisis, it was a reminder that no company was immune from existential failure. Public companies are reluctant to document and openly assess their failures.
Silicon Valley, technology and the venture-capital business model do a better job. Entrepreneurs and venture funders alike wear their failures like a badge of honor. They recognize their model is to make a lot of losing bets in pursuit of finding the next big winner.
The stigma that surrounds failure needs to go. The surest way to avoid future failure is to embrace and learn from past failures.
Long before many people experience a car that can drive itself, they’ll benefit from semi-autonomous systems that let them travel farther and safer. But they may never know it.
Stealth driver aids that provide many of autonomy’s benefits are moving from luxury vehicles to mass market models today.
The Nissan Rogue compact SUV and Leaf electric car already offer a system that make driving easier and safer so subtly that many car owners will never realize how much it’s helping them. Nissan’s new 2019 Altima midsize sedan will also offer the system, called ProPilot Assist, when it goes on sale later this year.
Unlike the high-profile, highcost poster children for autonomous driving — $80,500 for a Tesla S electric car with “Enhanced Auto Pilot” and $71,290 for a Cadillac and CT6 luxury sport sedan with Super Cruise — the Rogue and Altima are mainstream vehicles with mainstream prices.
“Customers really like these features,” said Eric Noble, president of product development consultant The Carlab. “Manufacturers will have to cascade them through their model lines.”
ProPilot Assist requires a hand on the steering wheel, but automates braking, acceleration and staying in your lane. It was part of a $790 option package that also included 19-inch alloy wheels on the Rogue that I recently tested on a long road trip. The Rogue is Nissan’s best-selling vehicle, and one of America’s sales leaders.
The Rogue SL AWD I tested stickered at $36,230, a price that puts it squarely in the heart of the market. A 2019 Altima midsize sedan with ProPilot Assist will likely cost less when sales begin later this year. Nissan also offers the system as part of a $2,200 tech package on Leaf electric car models starting at $32,490.
ProPilot Assist took a lot of the work out of my 2,000-mile-plus drive. It significantly increased how far I could go before fatigue set in.
“It’s more relaxed driving,” John Maddox, president and CEO of the American Center for Mobility, the new test track for developing autonomous and driver-assistance systems in Willow Run, just west of Detroit. Maddox uses a CT6 with Super Cruise on his daily commute. “I’m less inclined to speed or weave in and out of traffic.”
Super Cruise uses digital mapping, GPS location, advanced cameras and lidar to let drivers remove their hands from the wheel for hours at a time. It’s also a $5,000 option on an already lavishly equipped luxury car. Tesla S option packages for Enhanced Auto Pilot start at $5,000.
Nissan’s prices are lower because its ambitions are less lofty. ProPilot Assist takes systems that already provide lane departure assistance and adaptive cruise control and lets them talk to each other to keep your vehicle in its lane, at the speed you set and at a safe distance behind other vehicles with almost no input from the driver. Because it uses modestly priced cameras and radar, Nissan’s system — like Tesla’s more expensive one — requires the driver to keep a hand on the wheel at all times.
Over four days of highway driving, ProPilot Assist kept me centered in my lane and maintained a safe distance from vehicles in front of me. It worked equally well in daylight and at night. White lane markings on a light-colored road surface confused it on one strip of highway, triggering alerts that told me I needed to keep the Rogue in its lane. The system also requires the driver to take control when the windshield wipers are on, because rain may obscure lane markings. ProPilot Assist will continue its lane-centering with wipers set to intermittent, however.
“It’s a partnership with the driver in a management role,” Nissan R&D manager Andy Christensen said. “The system’s goal is to give the driver stability and confidence.”