Understanding Failure as the Road to Success

I just finished reading a book by Henry Petroski entitled, "Success through Failure."  Petroski is a professor of Civil Engineering at Duke University.  As the title implies, Petroski contends that the key to successful design rests upon the ability of the designer to learn from or to anticipate failures.  This holds true regardless of whether the design in question involves a physical structure such as a bridge, or a new process for making widgets.  Petroski points out that there is a great deal to learn from failure, but that success generally teaches us very little.

Failure has gained prominence recently as news reports describe failures in the nation's financial systems on a daily basis.  Most recently, we have followed, in horror, the catastrophic failure of the off-shore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico.  Both of these failures have evoked anger and outrage on the part of citizens and government officials alike.  America has come to value and expect success.  We, as a nation, do not tolerate failure well.

Yet, both of the above catastrophes are the result of success, not failure.  Each exemplifies the vulnerability that Petroski warned against in 2006, long before either crisis unfolded.  The seeds of the financial collapse were sewn while the economy enjoyed tremendous expansion and success.  BP and other companies convinced regulators that deep water drilling posed little threat based upon their previous successful attempts.   Each of these dramatic failures were the result of hubris and complacency engendered by past success.

Innovation requires exploring the unknown.  Dr. Jack Matson, a professor of engineering design at Penn State University, stresses the value of failure to his students.  Failure, he explains, is the way we map the unknown.

Of course, Dr. Matson is not recommending failure on the magnitude of the financial collapse or the BP deep water drilling disaster.  While these may teach us important lessons, the cost they impose is much too high. Rather, Dr. Matson advocates "intelligent" failure;  failure from which we can learn with minimal cost.  Failure that can illuminate the path to success.

In public education today, failure is an anathema.  Students learn to avoid failure from the earliest grades.  In school, failure is synonymous with defeat.  And, indeed, it is a defeat if we do not capitalize on it as a learning opportunity.

 Instilling within students an aversion to failure can have ominous consequences.  An aversion to failure results in an aversion to risk-taking.  An aversion to risk-taking results in an over-dependence on past success.  An over-dependence on past success often leads to catastrophic failure such as the two examples above illustrate.

Perhaps, as Matson and Petroski suggest, teaching our students to fail "intelligently" is the most important lesson we can offer them.