There are two parts to any failure: There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it. It is this second part that we control. Do we become introspective, or do we bury our heads in the sand? Do we make it safe for others to acknowledge and learn from problems, or do we shut down discussion by looking for people to blame? We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.

I felt embarrassed and afraid that my colleagues wouldn’t keep me on the research team. My thoughts spiraled out to what I would do next, after dropping out of graduate school. This unhelpful reaction points to why each of us must learn how to take a deep breath, think again, and hypothesize anew. That simple self-management task is part of the science of failing well.

As you will learn in this book, how we frame or reframe failure has a great deal to do with our capacity to fail well. Reframing failure is the life-enhancing skill that helps us overcome our spontaneous aversion to failure. It starts with the willingness to look at yourself—not to engage in extensive self-criticism or to enumerate your personal flaws, but to become more aware of universal tendencies that stem from how we’re wired and are compounded by how we’re socialized. This is not about rumination—a repetitive negative thought process that isn’t productive—or self-flagellation. But it may mean taking a look at some of your idiosyncratic habits. Without this, it’s hard to experiment with practices that help us think and act differently.

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.

When presented with the choice between admitting our mistakes or protecting our self-image, the decision is easy. We want to believe we are not at fault, so we find every reason to justify what we did as correct. That makes it hard to learn! A psychological bias known as the fundamental attribution error exacerbates the problem. Stanford psychologist Lee Ross identified this fascinating asymmetry: when we see others fail, we spontaneously view their character or ability as the cause. It’s almost amusing to realize that we do exactly the opposite in explaining our own failures—spontaneously seeing external factors as the cause. For example, if we show up late for a meeting, we blame traffic. If a colleague is late for a meeting, we may conclude he is uncommitted or lazy.