The big idea: why we need to learn to fail better
You’ve probably heard the cheerful quotes: Winston Churchill, with his “success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”, or CS Lewis, who wrote “failures are finger posts on the road to achievement”. What about Billie Jean King, who enthused “losing a tennis match isn’t failure, it’s research”? Maybe you find yourself thinking, “Sure. Easy to say when you’re famous and successful.”
For most people, failure is pretty simple: it’s bad, even shameful. Life is going well if you’re not experiencing failures, and we think that avoiding failure is obviously the right goal. We worry about what it says about us when we get something wrong (we’re not good enough!). The social stigma of failure exacerbates that spontaneous reaction.
The instinct is so strong that we can find ourselves upset about the smallest missteps – the comment that falls flat in a meeting, the stumble on an uneven sidewalk that has us furtively glancing around to see if anyone noticed. Add to these timeless anxieties the neverending chore of self-presentation in our age of ubiquitous social media. Countless studies find today’s teens obsessed with putting forward a sanitised version of their lives, endlessly checking for “likes”, and suffering from comparisons and slights, real or perceived.
And it’s not just the kids. Whether
related to our professional accomplishment, attractiveness, or social life, keeping up appearances can feel as necessary as breathing to many adults. Rationally, we may understand that failure is an unavoidable part of life, a source of learning, and even a requirement for progress in science and technology, yet emotionally and practically, it’s hard to experience it that way.
But what if we could learn to habitually reframe failure as a source of discovery and personal development? What if we could face problems and setbacks with honesty, determination and a healthy sense of realism? What if failure, as a token of our shared humanity, provided us with feelings of inclusion, not ostracism?
This is exactly what people like me, who study this kind of thing, argue is the right approach. We’ve questioned and pushed back against habitual ways of thinking about failure for quite some time now – even to the extent of advocating for increasing the frequency of failures in projects and workplaces around the world. You read that correctly. In our lives, and in our organisations, most of us would benefit from experiencing more failures, not fewer.
This potentially provocative statement applies only when those failures are the right kind of wrong, though. Plenty of failures should (and can) be prevented. When a patient goes into the operating theatre, it’s right that the surgeon triple check which knee is designated for surgery before making the first cut. When you’re baking a cake, it’s important to follow the quantities set out in the recipe. Best practices like these play a major role in preventing failure; however, they’re only available