The importance of failure in the learning process is well recognised, but how effective is it as an educational tool?
Oscar Wilde once said, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes”.
Failure itself is considered important because it puts the spotlight on potential/real problems, and helps stimulate the search for solutions.
Business & Failure
In the western world today, but especially America it is becoming more socially acceptable to fail in business. The logic being that smart people will try crazier things and produce more ground breaking products. This destigmatisationmakes failure less risky from a professional, individual and societal perspective. However, this may not be a good thing.In 2008 Harvard researchers looked at historical data of entrepreneurs who started businesses in America between 1975 and 2003. They wanted to see if there was any correlation between founders who’d previously failed in business and their performance in subsequent businesses.It turned out that an entrepreneur who failed in the previous venture was unlikely to do better than somebody who had never run a business in their life.Successful entrepreneurs on the other hand, were 50% more likely to succeedin a second venture.
Learning through failure may not be the best route to success.
While failure may be an important source for learning, it may be that the experience of previous successes are a stronger predictor of future performance. The reason for this is because each type of experience may result in a willingness to engage in improvement activities. Somebody who was previously successful will refine those actions of success, while failure can result in a reduced motivation to improve.
What happened the last time you failed?
Cast your mind back to the last time you succeeded or failed at something - what factors lead to that outcome? Chances are that if you failed at something, you would have attributed the cause to external factors (e.g. the environment, lack of training, performance of others) and your successes to internal factors (e.g. your natural ability). We do this to maintain a positive image of ourselves. This is known as attribution theory. This is important because by externalising our failures we are not taking personal responsibility, and are unlikely to be motivated to improve as much as somebody who internalised their failures.People don’t only learn from their own experience, but also the experiences of others. Where this gets interesting is when we start thinking about the observation of failure around us. When we see somebody fail, chances are that you will attribute their failure to that person’s inability, actions or effort (internal factors). Contrast that when you observe someones success - chances are you will link it with luck or forces beyond their control (external factors).
So, if we are more likely to learn when failure is attributed to internal factors like ability or actions, could the observation of other people’s failures be a shortcut to personal success?
The observation of failure
This is exactly the hypothesis that was tested in 2012 by a group of researchersobserving the practice of cardiothoracic surgeons. To give you a bit of background, as we age plaque builds up in the arteries supplying our heart. Over time this makes it harder to squeeze blood through and can result in nasty things like heart attacks.Surgeons resolve this by placing new tubes in bad hearts to help bypass theblocked sections - this is called a coronary artery bypass graft (CABG). Historically this procedure was highly associated with risk of strokes or mental disorders post-op until the late 90’s when researchers found a way to do the procedure without stopping the heart. This new procedure required much more dexterity from surgeons and meant they all required retraining.For 10 years the researchers followed and observed surgeons as they learned to do CABG on beating hearts witnessing 6,516 operations in total. They studied how the surgeons learned to get the procedure right, and what happened when they didn’t. How did a surgeon’s failure in one operation affect future surgeries? How quickly did they learn, and did failure help them improve?The results were surprising.
It turned out that surgeons who botched the new procedure tended to do worse in subsequent surgeries.
Rather than learning from their mistakes, their success rates continuously declined. Paradoxically when surgeons did well on a new surgery, more successes tended to follow. Just like the 2008 Harvard retrospective analysis of entrepreneurs starting businesses.Where this gets interesting is what happened to the surgeons who observed their colleagues fail at the new CABG procedure. When failure occurred, the observing surgeons showed a signifiant increase in their own success rates. Their performance would continue to improve with the observation of every subsequent failure. Even more perplexing is that when success was observed this did not translate into improvements in performance for the observers.
So, the surgeons messing up the operation got worse, but their observers would subsequently perform better.
And paradoxically when surgeons succeeded more successes would follow, but it was unlikely thats their observers would improve. Weird right? To understand this better you have to put yourself in a surgeons shoe’s.Every doctor fails at something. Seasoned physicians learn to become mentally and emotionally immune to it - some of your patients will not survive. The researchers concluded that it was this very coping mechanism which was responsible for the paradox. The surgeons attributed success and failure to factors which would allow the individual to feel good about themselves (internal when good, external when bad). Failure for example was seen as “bad luck”, “hard to see”, “unstable patient”, “not enough time” etc.As a result, their motivation to exert more effort on the same task in future was reduced, and they didn’t tend to work any smarter the next time. It would seem that although the experience of failure had valuable knowledge, without the subsequent effort to reflect on the experience, the potential learning would remain untapped.
How to hack success through failure
Externalising our mistakes is a survival mechanism - its how we learn to live with ourselves.
We have no problem assuming responsibility for our successes (even if we don’t brag about them) by attributing it to personal effort and ability. This in turn motivates us to exert effort in subsequent tasks so we continue to improve and learn.However, when failure it not personal, we do exactly the opposite. Observation of failure in others is blamed on lack of effort or ability. Observation of success is attributed to situational forces beyond our control such as luck.What we can all learn from this is that by reflecting on our failures with an intrinsic mindset, we can start having more honest discussions with ourselves about how to improve. This is not to say all failures in future are always secondary to intrinsic factors, but taking the time to reflect on them sets up the motivation to start improving.Here is to hacking our future success!