“Fail your way to success” only works if it’s the right kind of failure

Failure is a normal part of life. It happens to everyone, but most of us, as professionals or as students, spend vast amounts of time and energy desperately trying to avoid it.. 

Some forward-thinking businesses are now asking us to try and shed this fear and embrace failure as a fantastic way to learn.

The truth is, they’re right. Failure is a fantastic way to learn, but it has to be done right:

1. You have to care about the thing you’re failing at.

2. You have to have a feedback system where you can work out how and why you failed.

3. You need the time, space, confidence and cultural understanding of your peers that this failure is not inherently negative so that you can feel safe to try again.

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Back in 1993, the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues compared a group of exceptional figure skaters to some keen amateur ones. They worked out that the best skaters spent almost twice as many hours practicing and had twice as many falls as less accomplished skaters." 

If you are like me, this idea of elite athletes falling more than good amateurs will initially seem backwards, but it makes sense when it is explained that these top athletes are more willing to test the limits of their ability every day. It also helps that they have a feedback system of world-class coaches and video recording to help them pinpoint where they failed and how to improve. Each fall is then considered to be a learning experience not an emotional failure. 

This example has been used by proponents of business methodologies like “Fail Fast” and “Fail your way to success” ever since. Generally, adults find it hard to adopt this mentality, because that is not what they have been taught to do at school.

This is not the way that failure works for young people in a school system.

At school, from an early age, for 7 hours-a-day, 5 days-a-week we are trained to avoid failure. The nature of a class of 30 young people means that, despite the work of outstanding teachers to prevent this, mistakes are often stigmatised and laughed at and quickly become the motivation for socially-conscious young people to want to become invisible in the classroom. It’s hard to create a culture of “Fail fast and get better” if nobody wants to fail in the first place. 

Things get even worse when we think about the end point of our schools, exams.

Exams are the opposite to this idea of productive failure. 

The first thing we do is that we place the greatest importance on the end of year exam, the SAT, the GCSE or the A Level. 

These exams are lengthy, high-pressure and terminal, and there is no meaningful opportunity to reflect upon or correct any mistakes that you make. They are a one-shot deal. The grade that you get then becomes a reflection on your ability and stays with you for the rest of your life. The emotional weight is huge. When a test score determines your future, it turns a potential learning moment into a terrifying point of judgment. If you score poorly, the result is a static grade on a transcript, not a clear roadmap for improvement.

The system tells you that you passed or failed, but it doesn't really tell you, in a meaningful way, how to fix the knowledge gap and no one ever cares if you remember this information ever again after this exam.

The second thing to note is that these exams push our students to spend years preparing for tests on subjects and knowledge that other people have decided are important.

Right away, you lose that essential ingredient: the personal stake. If you don't care deeply about why you're learning quadratic equations or the details of the Treaty of Versailles, the process becomes a chore, not an exploration.

The fundamental issue is that we've confused assessment with actual learning. Learning is a sprawling, messy journey full of missteps and revisions. Assessment, in this current model, is a rigid stop sign. We need to flip the script.

To really embrace the idea that failure is a fantastic teacher, our educational methods—and honestly, our workplace cultures—need to adopt a model of continuous, low-stakes assessment with immediate, constructive feedback. 

We need to create environments where the penalty for failure is minor, but the value of reflection is major. When people feel safe to mess up, they're much more likely to be bold, try new things, and engage in the critical process of trial-and-error that leads to true competence and innovation. We shouldn't be shielding our young people from failure; we should be showing them how to use it. After all, the best success stories are almost always built on a solid foundation of constructive flops.

The Self Managed Learning Model: Making Failure Useful

1. Choice: Young people are allowed to choose what they study and how they study it. If young people care about the thing that they’re working on then when they fail, they’re more likely to want to continue to work at it and learn from those mistakes.

2. Feedback: Every week the young people have a learning group meeting with an adult mentor and a small number of peers. They are given the opportunity to reflect, review and evaluate their failures and they can ask the group for feedback and advice to improve. 

3. Low Risk, High Gain: None of these opportunities for failure are terminal and each review point is only a week after the last one. A week with lots of failures is not the end of the line. Young people are given time, space and the group develops a culture of empathetic understanding from peers that do not see failure as inherently negative so that young people can feel safe to try again.

   
   

By shifting our focus from the final, high-stakes exam grade to a system that encourages countless, low-stakes "falls" with quick, useful feedback, we can move closer to the effective learning model used by everyone who has become a master of their field, whether they want to be Olympic figure skaters or not.