Careful about Romanticizing Failure

Source: Vistage

Have we come to romanticize failure at times in business and in the society at large?  Perhaps we have.  Is that detrimental to us at times?  New research suggests that we should be careful about romanticizing failure.  Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Kaitlin Woolley, Eda Erensoy, and Minhee Kim have published a paper titled "The Exaggerated Benefits of Failure" in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.   They conducted a series of studies that demonstrate that we often overestimate the likelihood that people will rebound from failure and achieve success.  They write,

Across 11 studies, people in the lab and professionals in the field overestimated the rate at which health failures, professional failures, educational failures, and failures in a real-time task were followed by success. People thought that tens of thousands of professionals who fail standardized tests would go on to pass (who do not), that tens of thousands of people with addiction would get sober (who do not), and that tens of thousands of heart failure patients would improve their health (in fact, they do not).

The scholars argue that people consistently tend to overestimate how much we will learn from our failures.  In reality, we often are not effective at reflecting upon our failures, identifying the root causes of poor performance, and implementing corrective courses of action.  

I would argue that we need to stop repeating overused and inaccurate cliches about failure.  One that often bothers me: We learn more from failure than from success.  Actually, research suggests that we learn most effectively when we can compare and contrast failure and successful outcomes.  Reflecting on both success and failure leads to more improvement than only conducting lessons learned exercises after we fail.   

For those interested in practical guidance for how failure can lead to learning, I highly recommend Amy Edmondson's book, The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well.  Edmondson does not romanticize failure. Instead, she offers a clear-eyed view of different types of failure, some that are more preventable than others, and some which can lead to a great deal of learning if we approach them the right way.