Some failures are genuinely good news; some are not, but no matter what type they are, our primary goal is to learn from them.

Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Teams Use Failure to Succeed - Amy Edmondson

Introduction:

“Intelligent failures provide valuable new knowledge. They bring discovery. They occur when experimentation is necessary simply because answers are not knowable in advance.

For example, meeting with senior executives in a large financial services firm in April

2020, I listened as they explained that the current business environment made failure temporarily “off-limits.” Understandably concerned about an economic climate increasingly challenged by a global pandemic, these business leaders wanted everything to go as well as possible. Generally speaking, they were sincere in their desire to learn from failure. But enthusiasm about failing was acceptable when times were good, they told me; now that the future looked uncertain, pursuing unerring success was more imperative than ever. These smart, well-intentioned people needed to rethink failure. First, they needed to appreciate the context. The need for fast learning from failure is most critical in times of uncertainty and upheaval, in part because failures are more likely! Second, while encouraging people to minimize basic and complex failures may help them focus, welcoming intelligent failures remains essential to progress in any industry. Third, they needed to recognize that the most likely outcome of their prohibition on failure wasn’t perfection but rather not hearing about the failures that do occur. When people don’t speak up about small failures—say, an accounting error—these can spiral into larger failures, such as massive banking losses.

People such as James West and Jennifer Heemstra and Clarence Dennis skillfully applied the lessons they gleaned from painful setbacks as part of building successful and fulfilling lives. But we’re not hardwired to confront failure thoughtfully; we have to learn to do it.

Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach concluded that unawareness of failures’ useful information made learning from failure difficult. So they designed an experiment in which participants were helped to identify the useful information in their failures, and this made them more likely to share them.