Tal Ben-Shahar
Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar is an internationally renowned teacher and author in the fields of happiness and leadership. After graduating from Harvard with a B.A. in philosophy and psychology and a[…]
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Robert Sutton
Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, where he specializes in organizational behavior. His research includes the links between managerial knowledge and organizational action, organizational creativity[…]
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Perception Box
The art and science of failing well
There’s bad failure — the kind we ignore or hide — and good failure, which becomes data for future progress. Three experts discuss how to tell the difference.
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6 min
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with
Tim Harford
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Failure is inevitable, but your response to it is a choice – and it makes all the difference.
Journalist Tim Harford, PhD, psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD, and organizational behavior expert Robert Sutton, PhD, reveal how failure can become the foundation of success when it’s examined and built upon. Reframing failure as information, rather than a personal setback, is what sets productive thinkers apart.
TIM HARFORD: Whenever somebody turns a failure into success, something really interesting has happened, and we should be asking ourselves how and why.
We find it really hard to separate the idea that, “yeah, I made a mistake, I failed, I did something wrong,” with the idea that, “I am a failure.”
ROBERT SUTTON: There's no way that people can learn without failing. Think of some of the heroes of our day; they've made an enormous number of mistakes.
TAL BEN-SHAHAR: It's through failure that we can enjoy deep learning, become more resilient and stronger. And if you look at the life of any successful person, they've always had major, as well as minor, failures.
ROBERT SUTTON: I don't like failure. I think it sucks. It's a terrible thing. I wish it wasn't necessary, but I can't figure out any other way for people to learn how to do most things, but to sort of screw up enough until the point where they get better at it.
When I think about failure, there's three general sorts of responses that emerge from both the management literature and practice.
The first one is what I call “the forgive and forget” approach. And the problem with “forgive and forget” is there's no accountability and there's no learning.
The second approach is what I call the “Silicon Valley standard.” This is remember, blame, stigmatize, ostracize and humiliate. And the problem with that is that when you humiliate people or put them down when they fail, then they're afraid to admit mistakes, and the whole world turns into a cover-your-ass sort of game, so no learning occurs.
And the way that the most effective organizations—and in fact, if you look at research on hospitals that learn from medical mistakes—this is the mantra they sometimes use: it's to “forgive and remember.” So you forgive to have some psychological safety, and you remember so that you can learn from your own mistakes and other people's mistakes.
TAL BEN-SHAHAR: Anyone has the right to fail. I experience my downs. I experience hardships and difficulties just like anyone else does. And what positive psychology does is give one tools to overcome this.
Positive psychology essentially focuses on what works. When we focus on people's strengths, when we cultivate their happiness, we're actually indirectly also helping them deal with hardships and difficulties.
The first thing that an organization needs to do is to give space for people to fail. It needs to identify the areas where failure is not traumatic or terrible. To also consider giving people recovery space.
And this is necessary. That's part of creativity. It’s no coincidence that the word “creation” and “recreation” are etymologically linked. Because we need to recreate if we want to create.
These recovery periods in the long term actually contribute to creativity, productivity, as well as happiness.
TIM HARFORD: All of us are at risk of cognitive dissonance in a small way whenever we make a mistake—particularly a mistake on something that's important to us. When we've invested our reputation, when we put money into it, when we put time into it, that is when we are most at risk, because our self-image is under threat.
We find it really hard to separate the idea that, “yeah, I made a mistake, I failed, I did something wrong,” with the idea that, “I am a failure. I am the kind of person who makes mistakes, who gets things wrong.”
The first step in responding in a constructive way when you've made a mistake is to separate yourself from the mistake. To understand, you can be a person who made a mistake. That does not make you a person who will always make mistakes.
Then you'll be able to admit you got something wrong and start to, in a mature and forward-thinking way, think about how to fix it.
Since failure is around every corner—we're always making mistakes—if we try to do something interesting, we're going to be making mistakes. So whenever you're trying a new experiment, whether it's a new job, a new product, a new hobby, a new boyfriend or girlfriend, whatever it is, you need to give some thought to what you're going to do if it doesn't work out, and how to minimize the downside as well as take advantage of the upside.
The next thing is to have some sort of feedback mechanism that tells you whether things are going well or not going well, tells you whether you're succeeding or failing.
Often it's simply a case of asking yourself what the markers for success might be. Or even simpler than that, just asking someone you can trust to give you a straight opinion.
It can be remarkably hard to get people to give you an honest and constructive opinion, but that's absolutely essential. You may not always get responses, but that's the kind of feedback that you need if you're going to fix your own mistakes.
TAL BEN-SHAHAR: Thomas Edison has patented 1,093 inventions, more than any other scientist-inventor in history. He's also the scientist, as far as we know, who has failed the most times.
When Edison was working on the battery, an interviewer came over and said to him, “Edison, you have failed a thousand times. Give it up.” To which Edison responded, “I haven't failed a thousand times. I've succeeded a thousand times. I've succeeded in showing what doesn't work.”
Edison also famously said, “I failed my way to success.”
One of the mantras that I repeat over and over again to myself, to my students is, “learn to fail or fail to learn.” I tell them that I wish them that they fail more. And I truly, sincerely mean it.
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