When Failure is our Best Option
You’ve heard it many times before, “Failure is not an option.” When Gene Kranz uttered this line in reference to Apollo 13, he was absolutely right. At that moment it was imperative that the team succeed in bringing the crew home safely. If you’ve ever seen the movie Apollo 13, you will certainly remember this inspirational scene. In fact, it has become a maxim for NASA. Gift shops at the agency’s centers even carry a variety of products bearing this motto. But, could it be that line of thinking is now holding us back?
Recently I attended a training class where we learned of the practice of throwing Failure Parties. These parties are held by companies to celebrate their failures. There is no pointing of fingers or placing of blame on anyone, just food, drinks, cake, and a healthy discussion about what went right and what went wrong that allows the company to move forward. In some cases, this type of analysis can even turn a failure into a success, such as with products like Post-It notes, which resulted from a failed attempt at an improved adhesive tape. Even when a flop can’t be salvaged, moving forward is key.
If you’re still wondering why a company would want to celebrate its failures, consider this: the vast majority of ventures attempted end up in failure. For every ten products introduced to the market, maybe one or two will be successful, if they’re lucky. So, if a company takes the opposite approach and “beats up” employees for these failures, you can imagine that the ideas quickly begin to dry up. Not just the failing ideas, but the successful ones too. Smart companies have found that by celebrating their failures they encourage the kinds of ideas that lead to success. While blaming employees for failures is bad and hinders creativity, there is another option that is even worse.
When the culture dictates that failure is not an option, does it mean that we fail any less? No, of course not. It encourages refusal to admit or accept failure, even when it is staring us in the face. Then, instead of being able to move forward, we are stuck living with the failure, doggedly suffering through rather than owning up to our shortcomings. This could apply to something as mundane as a new program for submitting travel expense reports or something as critical as the design of a new spacecraft. The examples are hypothetical, but the phenomenon is real. I’m often surprised at how quickly these failures are taken up as the new way of doing business and workarounds or modifications mushroom into existence. When faced with an obvious flop, so often the reaction is to jump to mitigate it, rather than to backtrack and do it right. While there is a cost to admitting failure and going back to the starting point, I think that often this cost is less than what it takes to modify a failed design or work around a failed process.
So, what am I getting at? Failure will always be a part of everything we do that is new or innovative. It has to be; it is an integral part of the creative process. If we could just learn to accept failures and even expect them, we could begin to recognize them earlier and make fewer and less costly mistakes. As Roger Von Oech said, “Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn’t work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.” If we don’t shed the “failure is not an option” culture, we’re truly missing out on these opportunities.
9 Responses to “When Failure is our Best Option”
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tim846 on September 29th, 2009
Agreed! NASA’s cultural motto of “Failure is Not an Option” does nothing but lead to trouble. While an effective tool for motivating a team in a single crisis, the phrase has mutated into an unsustainable risk-averse trajectory for the agency.
Exploration and discovery are dependent on a core concept: the unknown. Dealing with the unknown means being caught off-guard sometimes or even failing to find anything new. That’s part of the thrill and excitement: you don’t know what you might find or learn!
Failure is a necessary and valuable part of the process of inquiry, exploration, and discovery. Without the opportunity to fail, you can never do or learn anything really new.
NASA’s use of the “Failure is not an option” mantra has limited the opportunities for real, groundbreaking exploration and development. Nothing new can be implemented or tested on a large scale if there is the possibility it might not work and cause a PR “black eye” for the agency. Hence, versions of the same basic missions, tools, and processes are reused over and over because they are known to work.
Perhaps most tragic of all has been the impact on education and inspiration. Instead of encouraging our best and brightest students to aspire to work in the aerospace industry, this image of NASA (and anyone working on the space program) can be a deterrent to pursuing dreams of being a scientist, technician, engineer, or astronaut. A student that doesn’t earn top grades (or gets into some trouble) may never consider working for an agency where perfection is not merely expected, it is required.
I think it is time for NASA to move on from the failure-averse mindset. We are ready to see the agency take risks, move boldly, and expand our presence in the cosmos. NASA can again be the role model for discovery and exploration once it sheds the heavy burden of pretending to be perfect all the time.
Outsourced and Shanked on September 29th, 2009
That’s nice. All the companies I’ve ever worked out celebrated failures by giving huge bonuses, pay hikes, and stock grants to the executives, laying off everyone not responsible for the failure, and declaring mission accomplished. That’s at least the way it seems to work in Silicon Valley. And on Wall Street. Hell, almost every publicly traded company.
Maj Dan Ward, USAF on September 29th, 2009
Great post – always fun to see what the Open NASA crew is up to! Love the idea of failure parties!
You might get a kick out of a little article I wrote this summer, titled Failure Is Inevitable. It was published in a DoD magazine – it’s available online here: http://www.dau.mil/pubs/dam/05.....-jun09.pdf
comtnclimr on September 29th, 2009
Great post!
Part of challenge in accepting failure is that we are an optimistic society and don’t want to give up on things. Think about the whole “too big to fail” talk in the banking industry.
we also catergorize things as failures, even when overall they may not be.
Just look at all the things our government feels the need to intervene in.
The American dream now consists of going to college even if you don’t want to, having health insurance even if you don’t want the hassle, driving an American/hybrid car even if it doesn’t fit your needs, making a profit even if you have no business running a business, owning a home even if you can’t afford it, having enough money to retire even if you didn’t save for retirement,and earmarks are often given to those who couldn’t win federal dollars on their own merit.
In the process of making sure no one fails, have we forgotten that what we need most of all is to learn how to identify and solve problems. Like you said, learning to succeed involves learning to fail,to try better next time and to find strength within oneself to achieve what you set out to achieve. It’s ok to fail.
tutiger87 on September 30th, 2009
WTF?! None of you work in Flight Control do you? Are you guys kidding me? Failure parties?! In Human Spaceflight, failure cannot, and never will be an option. When we fail in the MCC, people die. I won’t disagree with you about NASA’s being overly risk averse sometimes, but you have got to draw the line when it comes to the mission of launching people on top of a 4 million lb bomb, and then bringing them back from a vacuum at 25,000 MPH to zero.
Jessy on September 30th, 2009
@tutiger87 i’m pretty sure jen didnt mean to imply that we should celebrate failure resulting in the loss of human life, but that perhaps “celebrating” (acknowledging, discussing, *learning from*) failure in designs that will ultimately support those human flights would make them safer and more effective– or lead us to new innovative options.
for me the big takeaway is that because failure is taboo, we pretend it’s not there, which leads to more failures on all fronts.
BD on October 2nd, 2009
“Hey, we just blew up a rocket and killed the crew! Party time!” This idea would have to be applied very carefully. Often it is not just lives at stake, but careers. If individuals responsible for a failure are fired (a likely scenario), it seems a little frivolous to try to create a festive atmosphere out of it. Yes, I understand the INTENTIONS, but the reactions of workers are unpredictable. No one wants to dance on someone else’s grave.
That said, any organization can become too risk-averse. I’d prefer an environment that offered “brainstorming sessions” or “idea box socials,” where you celebrate/encourage the new ideas. That’s a little easier to sell–especially if the ideas are used–than “celebrating failure.”
My $.02.
/b
flyingjenny on October 2nd, 2009
Tutiger87 and BD, I think you’re missing what I was trying to get across here. I was not suggesting that NASA celebrate failures, but rather admit them when they surface, in order to move forward. This post was aimed more at the design, ground operations, and business sides of NASA, not MCC ops. I thought that would be clear given the examples I used, such as the design of a spacecraft or a computer system for submitting travel expense reports. Mission Control activities only make up a tiny fraction of the work NASA does.
What I was trying to say is, if the design of something is bad, it should be admitted openly (without fear) so that it can be fixed or redesigned before it becomes a safety or enormous cost issue. In the current environment, ego, stubbornness, and the “failure is not an option” culture keep people from admitting when something is a failure, so they keep going on and on in the wrong direction, leading to even greater losses.
flyingjenny on October 2nd, 2009
Great comments-
Tim846, you are right on with the “pretending to be perfect” statement. It is a huge burden.
Outsourced and Shanked, I think we’re talking apples and oranges here, but I feel your pain.
Maj Dan Ward, I loved your article- it was great! I’m now following you on Twitter as well
Comtnclimr, great point about the need for problem solving.
Jessy, thank you. Yes, you got what I was getting at. Pretending failures aren’t there doesn’t mean they aren’t.