AUGUST 23, 2006

Success Through Failure

I’m halfway through a book by Henry Petroski called Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design.  And it’s got me thinking about the role of failure.  Petroski writes about the sinking of the Titanic and basically says shipbuilders learned more from that spectacular disaster than if the boat had never encountered an iceberg.  If the Titanic had not sunk, its limitations and failures may not have been discovered for years.  So, in the end, it’s possible more lives were saved than not.

Petroski is specifically talking about the design of things, but I think his points go beyond design.  We’re all afraid of failure.  Afraid of making mistakes.  But let’s face it - when we goof up, we learn a lot faster don’t we?  Miles Davis said "Do not fear mistakes.  There are none."  I agree.

Tom Guarriello over at The TrueTalk Blog wrote a wonderful post last month about failure and learning how to "flunk in."  "We might even begin to acknowledge failures if we could say something like, ‘well, I thought I had it right and then it crashed, so I went in and found this solution; so I Flunked Into this one.’ "

Tom made some Rules for Flunking In -

• Fail fast, fail often
• Learn from failure through rigorous, systematic reflection - practice "Five Whys" or something like it.
• Celebrate failure -
• Appoint a CFO: Chief Failure Officer - give that Learning Officer something important to do: teaching people to fail and to learn from it.
• Distinguish among failures -
• Keep score - Bob Sutton (and I) have written about the difference between a culture that "forgives and forgets" and one that "forgives and remembers." The former’s a losing approach. The latter’s a learning approach.
• Encourage resilience - remember, the biggest barriers to Flunking In are emotional.

The biggest problem here is fear.  We’re paralyzed - this is one area where talking the talk is a whole lot easier than walking the walk.