Engagements & Resources

I am a professional ‘fail-er.’ Just considering the 10 years that I worked full time in research labs, I probably averaged at least five failures a day – these varied from small things like having to try several chromatography solvents to find one that worked for my separation to big things like finding out that the entire hypothesis behind my project was incorrect. Doing the math, this adds up to over 10,000 failures. And when I became a professor and stopped working directly in the lab, I just moved on to a different type of daily failure – ideas that didn’t work out, manuscripts that got rejected, lectures where I made a mistake. All of this to say: at this point in my career, I have a lot of experience with failure.

The last decade has also brought forth a significant amount of conversation – in both education and business – about “embracing failure.” This message certainly has merit, but often misses a key nuance:

The goal in research (or any aspect of our lives) is not necessarily to try to fail, but rather that when failure is possible, we learn how to fail better.

What does this look like in practice? Below are three ways in which you can approach failure with the goal of failing better.

1. Fail early. Failure is unpleasant, and just as with other unpleasant tasks, we can tend to procrastinate on facing it. In the context of a research project, this might look like doing all of the easy experiments first and putting off the ones that might kill the project until the very end. While the small successes might feel good in the short term, we end up losing in the long term as we’re likely to have times that we invest a significant amount of our time into a project that doesn’t go anywhere in the end. When we instead tackle the riskiest experiments first, we lose out on the gratification of the small wins, but we’re able to maximize our ultimate success by investing our time in the projects with the greatest potential.

2. Fail intelligently. There are many different types of failure, and our goal is to choose the best one. In her book Right Kind of Wrong, Leadership and Management scholar Amy Edmondson outlines the difference between simple failures and intelligent failures. Simple failures are the careless mistakes we make such as choosing the wrong reagent or setting up an experiment incorrectly, and which lead to preventable failures. In contrast, intelligent failure happens when we do everything right but still don’t achieve the desired outcome. In these cases, the failure means that there is something we don’t understand about how our system works, and so even though we may not succeed in the experiment, we still achieve an outcome of progress. Which brings us to…

3. Learn from your failure. Never waste a good (or bad) failure. Even when it is a simple failure, think about what factors led you to make that mistake and what system you can put in place to prevent something similar from happening again in the future. In the case of intelligent failures, take the time to dig in and see what the data are showing you and how this might reshape your hypothesis, and ultimately your understanding of the phenomenon you are studying. And you don’t have to wait until after a failure has happened to learn from it! A key to success can be talking through an experiment or procedure in advance with people you trust and who have the knowledge to point out places where you might fail and what you can do to minimize that likelihood.

Failing is never fun, especially in the moment. However, developing our skills to be a professional fail-er can help us avoid ultimate fail-ure and give us the best chance at “embracing success” instead.

For more leadership ideas, check out Labwork to Leadership