Failure Should Be an Option
I love stories, both old and new. One of my favorites is told in the movie Apollo 13. The most iconic line from the film was spoken by Flight Director Gene Kranz (played by Ed Harris):
“Failure is not an option.”
In spite of this statement, however, the entire movie (up to the end) chronicles a series of repeated failures. The initial failure of the spacecraft is followed by successive failures to find the fixes necessary to bring the astronauts safely home. Only by repeatedly working through a myriad of failed responses is success achieved. This was a movie about an heroic collective effort to deal with failure head on, not about avoiding it.
Another story about failure is an old one — Jack and the Beanstalk, a well-known English fairytale that likely originated around 5000 years ago. Like Apollo 13, the story begins with failure. Jack is tricked into trading the family cow for “magic beans”. Had Jack’s mother been prone to participation-award parenting, she might have praised him and placed his beans on the mantle in a special jar labeled Jack’s Magic Beans. But she did what moms have done from the beginning of time. She sent Jack off to bed and threw his beans out the window. Jack knew he had failed.
The important point of this story is that had Jack been blessed with an overly indulgent mother, there would have been no encounter with the giant, no golden-egg-laying-goose, and no magical singing harp. Jack’s world would have been poorer without failure.
The American population is on average (neglecting the profoundly serious issue of income disparity) the richest population that has ever walked the face of the earth. Rich people have an expectation of safety. But we rich folks are also (perhaps to our detriment) privy to every major tragedy that occurs both near home and around the world. On a daily basis, our exaggerated expectation of safety slams up against a distorted view of our vulnerability. Failure seems all around us … and we don’t like it.
Perhaps this is why there are so many popular self-help books and articles that point out the importance of failure for achieving success. Failure can lead to changes of attitude and direction. Failure means that poor ideas and poorly conducted ventures fall by the wayside. Failure leads to re-designs and reconsiderations of ways of doing things. Failure points the way to a better future that often cannot be discerned without it.
We seem to have failed to notice that a failure-free world is a poor world. It was an inventive risk-taking entrepreneurial world that provided us with the things that have made us safer. It’s perhaps more than a bit ironic that past failures are what have enabled us to desire failure-free lives.
If we’re going to continue to have a rich and safe future, we must learn to better tolerate — and even embrace — more failure than we now do. This does not mean to suggest that we should tolerate irresponsible, negligent, or criminal failure. But we should embrace an increased willingness to examine failure openly and transparently while avoiding the knee-jerk reaction that every failure must be “somebody’s fault”. Open examinations of failure that forgo automatic finger-pointing (and litigation) are what lead to failure’s most positive benefits.
There should be more conversations about the difference between understandable failures and those due to willful negligence or malfeasance. These conversations will not be easy. Here’s a good TED talk to kick things off.
