Failure — Looking beyond the obvious
All of us have come across social media posts, and quotes about how failures weave the path toward success. We must have heard stories of successful people, who were once a failure, and then they learned from it and became the person they are today, right? But what does it take to entwine the strand of failures into a knitted tapestry of success? Is learning from failures that straightforward?
Well to begin with, what is failure? You could say it’s relative and that’s true. However, it would be safe to say it’s our inability to meet an expectation. Failure in its different guises violates our expectations, providing an excellent opportunity to learn and grow. Learning from failures requires openness. But our society has a deeply rooted contradictory attitude to failure. We are quick to blame others for their mess and at the same time keen to conceal our own. And this results in a psychological trap wherein we cover up our mistakes not only from others but from ourselves. The internal fear of failure becomes so threatening that we ignore or reframe our own mistakes, developing a cognitive tendency of favouring our existing beliefs, right or wrong rather than looking for valid explanations. This often leads us to overlook our mistakes, downplaying our responsibilities and finding ways of dumping the blame on others or situational factors. Hence the first and most crucial step towards learning from failure is acknowledging it.
Accepting failures requires courage but mere acceptance isn’t enough. Learning from failures requires examining them in depth which is often emotionally painful and it challenges our self-esteem. It doesn’t have to be this way we can redefine our relationship with failure, learn to embrace it, and develop “Black box thinking”.
What is black box thinking?
Following the increased number of aeroplane accidents during the 1950s the aircraft industry decided to equip all planes with two black boxes. They record electronic instructions, sounds and conversations from the cockpit. They are almost indestructible so if the aircraft meets an accident the boxes are opened and data is analyzed thoroughly to find the exact reason for the accident. This is done to make the necessary changes which ensure the same error is never repeated thereby reducing mishaps. Built on this concept, Mathew Syed in this book by the same name introduces “Black box thinking”. It refers to adopting the same mentality while dealing with our failures, analysing the reasons and looking beyond the superficial to learn from mistakes. A similar concept has also been introduced by Sim Sitkin, a professor at Duke University, called “intelligent failures.” And as Sim explains intelligent failures are beneficial to us because they provide us with knowledge, value, and insight. Failure is cognitively expensive and goes against our base survival instincts. But our brains can be trained to adopt black-box thinking.
So, next time when we fail let’s fail better. Confronting our failures upfront, reflecting on them and start looking for ways to mitigate them better.
