As I mentioned several weeks ago, I have been thinking a lot about failure. Why are most of us so afraid of it? How does it really impact our lives? How do some types of failure impact us more than others? And why don’t we discuss it as much as we do success?
Failure is pervasive. Failure is everywhere, across time, across place and across different aspects of life. Ninety-nine point nine nine per cent of all biological species which have ever existed are now extinct…On a dramatically shorter timescale, more than 10 per cent of all the companies in America disappear each year. Large and small, from corporate giants to the tiniest one-person business, they fail.
But, most of the time we would rather focus our attention on the winners. Think of how many books on the business shelf at Barnes & Noble highlight companies, investors and products that are succeeding; each book offering ten easy steps to replicate their incredible path of victory whether or not they are accurate or even relevant.
It’s understandable. Winners make us feel good and feed the fire of our hopes and dreams as we attempt to learn their secrets and imitate their actions. And talking about failing, well, it’s just depressing. The simple act of reading this post will probably cause some uber-positivity bloggers to commit hara-kiri.
Yet, when we dismiss the losers and focus all our study on the winners, we are missing out on an incredibly rich source of information and wisdom–the very wisdom necessary to avoid making the exact same mistakes in our own lives AND the wisdom that is often more relevant and applicable than the “10 Easy Steps” path to success.
What did the guy learn who came in second place, or last for that matter? Do you really know what caused the collapse of Enron or are you guessing? What were the steps in the chain that led to the Challenger and Columbia disasters? Why did your Grandfather end up broke and living off welfare? These are questions we need to be asking.
The key to all of these questions is realizing that they could happen to any of us…unless we learn from them. No one wakes up one day and says, “Today, I plan on completely failing! I’m going to cheat on my wife, then run my business into bankruptcy so one day I can be a homeless alcoholic begging for food outside of McDonalds.” I’m not suggesting we quit studying success stories altogether, but failure is much sneakier than it’s counterpart.
Failure is insidious by nature, no one expects it will happen to them and therein lies its power.
Lieutenant General (Ret.) Hal Moore, the heroic commander portrayed by Mel Gibson in the movie “We Were Soldiers,” understood this principle well. In one of my favorite scenes, Moore is reading late at night in his study about what else? Failure. Specifically, the bloody defeat of the French at the hands of the Viet Minh, quickening the end of French rule in Indochina. Moore knew he would soon be neck deep in the Vietnam conflict and the lessons learned from the French failure would be of great value to him as he led his men into a similar environment.
At multiple points throughout the conflict, Moore has flashbacks to his previous studies and makes decisions based on what he had learned. In doing so he ensured that him and his men would not suffer the same fate as the French. Moore had already seen failure through the eyes of the French commanders a decade earlier, so he had no need to see it himself.
Failure is always the result of something else. If you look at almost every famous failure throughout history you will see a chain of seemingly insignificant events, a destruction chain that had may chances of being broken along the way, but ultimately grew unchecked until judgment day.
Check out some of the factors at play in the Columbia disaster which killed 7 astronauts, destroyed $4billion of spacecraft and left debris scattered over 2000 sq miles of Texas:
From the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, see full presentation here
- Insulating foam separates from external tank 81 seconds after lift-off
- Foam strikes underside of left wing, breaches thermal protection system (TPS) tiles
- Superheated air enters wing during re-entry, melting aluminum struts
- Aerodynamic stresses destroy weakened wing
Flawed Decision Process:
- Foam strike detected in launch videos on Day 2
- Engineers requested inspection by crew or remote photo imagery to check for damage
- Mission managers discounted foam strike significance
- No actions were taken to confirm shuttle integrity or prepare contingency plans
You may be asking, “Why did the mission managers not feel the foam strike was a significant enough issue to warrant a new plan?”
Easy, foam shedding had come to be viewed as normal because it had occurred on so many missions before. This in spite of the fact that a Ground System manual stated, “…No debris shall emanate from the critical zone of the External Tank on the launch pad or during ascent…” The unspoken doctrine became, “Foam shedding hasn’t hurt us before, so why should we expect it to in the future.”
All this and we haven’t even looked at the issues with budget cuts and haphazard safety inspections. What am I getting at? The Columbia disaster did not happen on re-entry, it happened over many years as deviations became normalized and a culture was produced that viewed non-failure as success. The disaster chain could have been broken many times along the way, but it was not.
By studying why things fail we get a chance to see our own flaws, weaknesses and blind spots before they become a long and complex destruction chain. If we can do this we then free ourselves to focus on the intricacies of success in a much more realistic context.
Failure happens whether we like it or not. Those who deny it’s existence and pretend that happy thoughts and a few self-help books will give them a free ticket to success soon discover that we live in a fallen world. By confronting and studying failure at every step we don’t fall victim to it as easily. And if we’re thinking about it and planning accordingly, it ceases to have the same power over us. So, one last time, let’s hear it for the losers.
“Why Most Things Fail” by Paul Ormerod
Lessons Learned From the Columbia Disaster, “Safety & Organizational Culture” American Institute of Chemical Engineers. 2005