Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well

We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails! —Dolly Parton

Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

Once you start seeing systems—seeing connections between parts—you can begin to see ways to alter the most important systems in your life or organization to reduce unwanted failures and to promote greater innovation, efficiency, safety, or other valued outcomes.

If you’re not failing, you’re not journeying into new territory.

Frontline nurses came up with and implemented two more elements of the patient safety system: Safety Action Teams and Good Catch Logs. Safety Action Teams were self-organized groups of nurses who met to identify and reduce potential hazards in their clinical areas. Second-order problem-solving indeed. The Good Catch Logs were a way of celebrating near misses: by documenting good catches, nurses identified additional opportunities for process improvement.

What you want is to benefit from the simple act of asking, (1) “Who and what else is affected by this?” and (2) “What might happen later, as a consequence of doing this now?

Pause to challenge the automatic thoughts that cause you pain and embarrassment. Next, reframe those thoughts to allow you to choose learning over knowing. To look outward and find energy and joy from seeing what you missed. At the core of the reframing task lie the words we use to express our thoughts, privately and aloud. Am I failing, or am I discovering something new? Do I believe I should have done better—and I’m bad for not having done so—or do I accept what happened and learn as much as I can from it? Am I okay with the discomfort that comes with new experiences? Will I give myself permission to be human? Permission to learn?

Larry boiled Maultsby’s multistep practice of rational self-counseling down to this: Stop—Challenge—Choose. Stop means pause. Breathe. Get yourself ready to challenge your spontaneous, usually unhelpful, thinking. Is it rational? Is it promoting your health and helping you achieve your goals? If the answer is no, this is a signal to choose what Maxie would call a more rational response—a response that works better in helping you achieve your goals. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about what helps you move forward.

What if those teams had created a better work environment? What if they had built a climate of openness where people felt able to speak up? What if that environment made it easier to be open and honest about error? To err is human. Mistakes happen—the only real question is whether we catch, admit, and correct them. Maybe the good teams, I suddenly thought, don’t make more mistakes, maybe they report more. They swim upstream against the widely held view of error as indicative of incompetence, which leads people everywhere to suppress acknowledging (or to deny responsibility for) mistakes. This discourages the systematic analysis of mistakes that allows us to learn from them. This insight eventually led me to the discovery of psychological safety, and why it matters in today’s world.

The failure craze—the “fail fast, fail often” culture that wants us to embrace failure seemingly indiscriminately—takes inspiration from the intelligent failures inherent to innovation but risks glossing over the vast and varied failure landscape, which also includes basic and complex failure.

When we see failures as shameful, we try to hide them. We don’t study them closely to learn from them. Brown distinguishes between shame and guilt. Shame is a belief that “I am bad.” Guilt, in contrast, is a realization that “what I did is bad.” “I am bad because I didn’t do my homework” engenders feelings of shame. But if I see my actions as bad (guilt), it fosters accountability. It is thus better to feel guilty than ashamed; as Brown tells us, “Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders… [while] guilt [is] inversely correlated with those things.

At times the line between a basic failure and a complex failure blurs.

In response to a question, Teller noted that neither he nor anyone else could promise that layoffs would never happen. But if layoffs were needed, the first to go would be people who had never failed. Context is critical to interpreting that statement. If you’re leading a moonshot factory, you simply cannot afford to have people on the team who are unwilling to take risks. People who take smart risks will, inevitably, sometimes fail. That’s what good performance looks like!

A healthy failure culture rewards intelligent failure. Without it, there can be no innovation. Without innovation, no organization can survive over the long term. But vaguely negative consequences for not trying can make a healthy failure culture even more powerful.

At the end of her life, in the 1860s, when she had become the Grande Dame of Champagne, Barbe-Nicole wrote to a great-grandchild, “The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity.” Act with audacity! In other words, play to win.

For me, losing a tennis match isn’t failure. It’s research. —Billie Jean King

Appreciating the dynamics of systems is the last of the three competencies for practicing the science of failing well. After self-awareness and situation awareness is system awareness. Mastering system awareness starts with training yourself to look for wholes rather than zooming in, as we naturally do, on the parts. It’s about expanding your focus, even if briefly, to redraw the boundaries and see a larger whole and the relationships that shape it.

vital element of TPS: a deeply ingrained belief that problem-solving is a team sport. Failures are opportunities for improvement. Competent professionals are expected to successfully execute most of their tasks, so successes are not seen as worthy of colleagues’ valuable time.

A key difference between Toyota and 3M is the scope of leeway for experiments. Toyota’s community of scientists works to perfect a system of production designed to remove unwanted variation and ensure perfect quality; the scope of experiments is limited for the most part to those that improve existing processes. At 3M, in contrast, scientists are invited to go wild, think outside the box, and imagine useful products that don’t yet even begin to exist. But in both systems, psychological safety plays a vital role.

Create “a community of scientists”? In a factory? Absolutely. TPS and the systems designed for innovation at 3M and IDEO have in common that they create communities of scientists. Helping you think like a scientist—curious, humble, willing to test a hypothesis rather than assume it’s right—is what ties them together.

Another crucial element of TPS is its focus on eliminating waste (muda) wherever possible. Excess inventory is a form of waste (just recall the Beer Game!), so just-in-time (JIT) production (build only what is needed, when it is needed, by your customer) is a crucial element of the system. JIT also complements the Andon Cord. The two elements work together to ensure that defects are discovered and resolved rather than piling up in work-in-process inventory. Both elements build learning into the system, to enable continuous improvement (or kaizen).

The desire to halt any error in its tracks, before it disrupts other steps in the process, also reveals an intuitive appreciation of system effects. A single small error can easily compound into a major failure downstream if left uncorrected.

Toyota calls its approach, which has evolved over decades of experimentation, the Toyota Production System, or TPS.

Practicing systems thinking starts with consciously expanding your lens from its natural preference for here and now to include elsewhere and later. Two simple questions can help: Who and what else will be affected by this decision or action? What additional consequences might this decision or action cause in the future?

Temporal discounting, discussed in chapter 3, refers to our tendency to downplay the magnitude and importance of events that happen in the future.

later in this chapter we’ll look at how 3M designed a system to foster innovation, rather than simply announcing innovation as a goal and hoping for more of it.

By taking the time to consider how a system works, many complex failures can be avoided. This starts with understanding how a system’s elements interrelate and what vulnerabilities those relationships create. Whenever we say an accident was “waiting to happen,” we’re intuiting that a system was vulnerable to failure.

These and other obscure insights from my early career as Buckminster Fuller’s chief engineer left me with a deep appreciation for systems. Fuller was quick to point out that most people’s education hadn’t prepared them to see systems. He believed that ever-increasing specialization threatened our ability to appreciate how systems work. Moreover, in school we learn to break problems down into parts, which enables focus and progress in many fields of knowledge but blinds us to larger patterns and relationships. Traditional management systems similarly break work down into parts, inhibiting collaboration and innovation in favor of reliability and efficiency.

Systems exhibit synergy: the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Put slightly differently, the behavior of the whole can’t be predicted by the behavior of the parts examined separately. Only by considering the relationships between parts can you explain a system’s behavior.

A system’s results are less shaped by its individual parts than by how the parts relate to one another.