How to Learn From Failure
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
Top Ten Links Week 5
My personally selected top 10 from the links I shared on Twitter from 1/29/2010 thru 2/4/2010
- about dismantling the echo-chamber… more on the echo chamber
- Content Creators & Consumers (& the iPad) – an interesting post on who the audience of the iPad is. I know its not me, but I’ve had conversations with enough people who are just waiting to get one that I know there is an audience no matter what the techies feel its lacking.
- Facebook Is Working On A Foursquare-Killer
- Why Smart People Don’t Learn from Failures – its ok to fail, just be sure you learn something from it.
- President’s budget freezes library funding, omits school libraries from education increase if you haven’t heard or read about this you need to and read Buffy Hamilton’s response An Indecent Proposal
- Don’t feed the trolls, unless you’re feeding them tranquilizers – great article on how to handle blog comments, including how to handle trolls
- 10 Steps to Promote Learning in Your Conference Presentation
- Information and services should be equal
- But, I Like My Loser Friends! great post from Mary Schmidt at Lip-Sticking in response to The Most Important Success Tip:Stop Lying Down with Dogs, Already from Copyblogger
- ALA Learning -5 Tips for Trainers to Prevent TechFail



