Get to know the lessons of failure
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Being good at solving problems: that’s what professionals do daily in a wide range of occupations.
It means having to come up with fresh ideas to fix things in need of fixing.
That’s not always an easy task. After all, inspiration is a tricky, elusive thing. Even among my own clients—from those managing a business to those managing a team—what I often see are people struggling to find new ways to solve problems.
Does that sound familiar to you, |NAME|?
In that search, this is precisely when you are most vulnerable to a mistake so many of us are prone to making: you go looking for success stories. And by that, I mean you limit your search only to cases where an idea has been tried and has proven itself as effective (or at least we think it has). In doing so, we overlook something that has equal value: the lessons of failure.
Ours is a culture that frowns on failure and treats it as the opposite of success. It’s why you still hear that worn cliché: “failure is not an option.” What an absurd expression. Failure is always an option. The trouble is that most of us don’t understand what that option really looks like.
What do you really know about failure?
Unlike success, which tends to be defined in a specific, measurable way, failure remains an abstraction for most of us. It’s a vacuum we fill with worst-case outcomes and bad things we don’t really like to think about all that much.
Why does this happen, |NAME|? Most of us have a limited understanding of what failure is because we’re too busy being afraid of it.
Since most of us go to amazing lengths to hide these instances when they do occur, people just don’t spend as much time as they should studying (http://thinkitcreative.com/blog/content-mass-audience-and-failure/) failure.
That’s not just an opinion: it’s an observable behaviour and an error in logic that statisticians call survivorship bias.
Here’s a classic example of how it works: at the height of World War II, the Americans and their allies wanted to reduce the number of bombers being lost to enemy fire. To do that, they planned to reinforce the fleet of aircraft where they thought they were most vulnerable. Planes that had successfully returned from bombing runs were thought to be a good guide in this regard.
But mathematician Abraham Wald had an entirely different take on this. He told the military brass that these bullet-riddled planes told you exactly where not to add heavy reinforcements.
Wald understood that the distribution of hits sustained on bombers that didn’t return is unknowable. You can draw only a limited number of conclusions from the ones that did. The bullet holes on the surviving aircraft didn’t reveal where they were vulnerable: they just showed where they could be hit and still be able to fly.
In the realm of creativity, success stories only teach you about ideas that survive—those that were successful in avoiding being shot down, much like those ragged bombers. More often than not, those success stories can’t really tell you why an idea survived. They can tell you nothing about where the weak points were on ideas that failed.
All that insight remains submerged. And most of us never bother to go looking there.
Even worse, as Nassim Taleb cautions in his book Antifragile, we “mistake the unknown for the nonexistent.” So how can we make better use of failure in our decision-making?
Clashes are good. Just as success stories can stunt your thinking, surrounding yourself too often with likeminded people can insulate your decision making, stripping away the friction you need to develop and execute great ideas.
There’s a great story (http://www.fastcompany.com/3029906/agendas/how-disneys-imagineers-keep-the-magic-ideas-coming) about how Disney executives once toyed with the idea of having Mickey and Minnie Mouse get married. To most around the boardroom table, it seemed like a good idea. But there was one lone voice that spoke up and made a convincing case against it.
Peter Rummell, former chair of Disney’s imagineers group credits that smart decision to having an eclectic team of people who don’t necessarily see eye to eye on creativity. Rummell says it best: “An accountant sitting next to a poet is a really good idea.”
Granted, we can’t all have a cabinet of rivals to guide our organization. But it’s entirely within our power to be choosy about whom we surround ourselves individually when developing our ideas.
Not rocket science. Does that mean that risk isn’t important in our creative thinking? Well, it depends. When NASA develops a plan to put something into space, they devise systems that are meant to be failure proof. They have to. The consequences of failure for them are catastrophic.
But most of us are not in the rocket science business. Too many of us pretend as though we are.
In fact, we have the luxury of being able to take reasonable chances. And if we are lucky enough, we get to work in places that give us the latitude to explore those chances.
My absolute favourite chapter in Pixar president Ed Catmull’s new book, Creativity Inc., talks about fear and failure in business. “Management’s job is not to prevent risk,” he says, “but to build the ability to recover.”
With this in mind, he argues, the better way to make decisions is to create a culture where you can be wrong as fast as you can.
Notice we he didn’t say there? There’s no mention of planning for failure or of weighing risk or of having a system that’s good at assigning blame when things go wrong. Those are the things that tax our time and distract us from the true purpose to our work.
Want more inspired thinking? Stop getting too hung up on the success stories of others.
Develop a clearer understanding of failure. Build your own system of idea generation that lets you try more things.
Learn to recognize that winning ideas don’t get that way simply by being the best among many. Their true strength is resilience.
Very best, Patrick
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