cc image used courtesy of connors got heart on flickr
So often when talking about innovation or change we hear someone say don’t be afraid to fail. That is harder than it sounds, I mean really; who wants to fail? Who wants to stand up in front of a group, no matter how big or how small and admit they were wrong. I know some people would admit they were wrong, but no one wants to be wrong.
Part of the problem is failure is seen as a waste of time, of money or other resources. But we can learn a lot from failure as Jonah Lehrer writes Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
Too often, we assume that a failed experiment is a wasted effort. But not all anomalies are useless. Here’s how to make the most of them
- Check Your Assumptions - Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.
- Seek Out the Ignorant - Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.
- Encourage Diversity - If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.
- Beware of Failure-Blindness - It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.
Read more
- Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail (Intelligently): How Great Organizations Put Failure to Work to Improve and Innovate
- Kent Bottles: Why Smart People Don’t Learn from Failures
- How You Learn More from Success Than Failure
- Try, Try Again, or Maybe Not
- Trying and Failing Enhances Learning, According to Research by Nate Kornell
- Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn
- What Steve Wozniak Learned From Failure
- The Role of Failure in Learning
Similar Posts:
- Stop Wasting Your Failures! Plan for Intelligent Failure
- Want Innovation? Get Out of the Way
- Pivot Points For Change: Libraries And Librarians
I think David Foster Wallace said it very well when he talked about how within failure there is always a victory.
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Great post Bobbi – I agree 100%. In fact, at a summer “camp” I attended in 2003, one of our themes was celebrating failure. It sounds odd until you think about it but everyone that succeeded at anything knows what it takes to get there – try, try again, improve, learn, teach others.
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Right on, Jeff!! Best things for us AND kids to learn…
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[...] not the mistake. It’s how you deal with it by @dontgetcaught I’ve written before about mistakes and learning from failure. This post from Denise talks about how making a mistake while speaking [...]
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