Learning from Failure
Michael Jordan
We’ve all failed many times and on many different occasions. Successful people not only embrace the failure but incorporate it into their learning process. It’s important to remind yourself regularly that failure isn’t a bad thing, which is why we keep some great quotations about failing posted on our office walls. I’ve included a few of my favorites in this post.
I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. — Michael Jordan
We start failing early in life. We failed many times before we learned how to sit, and then to stand, and then to walk, and then to run. As babies, we would attempt to imitate adults but we’d fail almost always. We’d then learn from that event, adjust and try again. At some point, we’d master the skill we failed at so many times before.
Later on in life some of us raised their hand and got an answer to a teacher’s question wrong and vowed never to offer ideas unless we were absolutely sure. Others had a similar experience early on in their careers when excitement at sharing an idea turned into embarrassment under scrutinizing eyes of our disapproving colleagues. Our ego got in the way and we became afraid of failure. Failure would challenge the assumptions we created about ourselves. That is sometimes hard to face. It’s easier to avoid those moments by shying away from failure-prone situations.
Successful people do the opposite. None of the great inventions we rely on today came without a series of failed prototypes (like the Wright Brothers’ flying machine, the incandescent light bulb, Tesla’s electric motor, the telephone) and that is why we use Tim Berners-Lee‘s internet and not videotex to access this blog. Great inventors learned how to incorporate controlled failure into their learning process as well as learn on other people’s mistakes. Surprisingly, some great inventions embody failures to achieve something else – please remember Spencer Silver next time you use his Post It notes.
If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate. — Thomas John Watson, Sr.; the founder of IBM
People of all professions have followed suit and deliberately learned from failure (traders and published authors, consultants, entrepreneurs). One of the reasons why I love Agile development is because of its “release early and fail often” mantra. It helps us developers deliver value to users of our software by having them use our initial best efforts. This mantra also instructs us to be retrospective and accommodate for failure by iterating over our designs. Eventually, we can come up with such great inventions like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. None of those services were even close to what they mean to so many today had they not learned to incorporate failure into their daily routine.
Failure at Rypple
Two of the common personality traits here at Rypple are hard work and ability to turn failure into a learning opportunity. It’s in our nature to perceive users experiencing issues with our service as failures but when this happens we seek to understand the underlying causes without shirking responsibility or blaming others. And it’s not a secret that a great product comes from doing great work, having a highly experienced team, and sticking to basics. YAGNI and KISS mentality are our core principles and we focus on iteratively creating a product that’s great at exactly one thing: getting people quick, frequent, and insightful feedback.
In the next week’s blog I will talk about how we’ve incorporate failure here at Rypple and how we’ve learned from it to improve our service. I would also like to hear about how others have learned to incorporate failure into their learning process.
[...] promised in previous Learning from Failure post, I’m going to use an example of how we’ve adapted Rypple’s design in [...]
That’s not a Ben Franklin quote. It’s Thomas Edison. And you link is broken.
Hi Jason,
Thank you for checking out this blog post and corrected my mistake. I made appropriate updates.
This is such an important point! In the book, “The Knowing-Doing Gap” by Pfeffer and Sutton, they talk about the importance of creating a space where failure is tolerated as a means of learning. If managers don't create that space, then learning and growth won't happen. In the book, they give the example of Benjamin Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. “Zander notes that it is only when the performer lifts his or her sights from simply not playing a wrong note to something more that beautiful music can occur. And it is only by risking hitting the wrong notes that learning results.”
How, then, can we create a safe space for others — and ourselves — to hit the wrong notes once in awhile so that new learning can emerge? The following are a few ideas from the Knowing-Doing Gap:
* Treat failure to act as the only true failure; punish inaction, not unsuccessful actions.
* Encourage leaders to talk about their failures, especially what they have learned from them.
* Give people second chances.
* Banish people — especially leaders — who humiliate others.
In addition to these, I have a few additional ones:
* Create an environment where mistakes and missteps are discussed as a means of learning. With clients, I often set up weekly team meetings where the team can discuss their experience with trying out new behaviors. These are great learning events for the entire team.
* Help people extract the lesson from the mistake. This requires a little time to reflect. Too many people rush by the mistake and never learn from it. When this happens, we are doomed to keep repeating the mistake.
* Be a model for others. When the inevitable mistake occurs, acknowledge it, take ownership of it, fix it, and then model the process of reflecting on what you've learned. (Don't we all dislike the leader who makes a mistake and blames others?)
I particularly like the phrase in the above quote that “it is only when the performer lifts his or her sights from simply not playing a wrong note to something more that beautiful music can occur.” Have you ever encountered anyone who excelled or created something innovative by merely not hitting the wrong notes?