The Poverty of Embracing Failure
How the idolisation of failure leads to less meaningful lives
By Joachim Skanderby Johansen
During the last two decades, everyone from management gurus to CEOs and presidents has been telling us to start embracing failure. This is a dangerous shift in culture: The pro-failure movement risks leading our attention away from the more fundamental goal; a culture that recognizes human beings’ need for mastery of skills to flourish.
Failure is in Vogue
In the past decades, it has become part of public orthodoxy that we need to embrace – or even love – failure. The reasoning behind this creed is usually quite sympathetic. It points to the fact that if we fear failure too much, we might fail to act, that failing is an essential part of learning, and that – quite simply – failing is an unavoidable part of life. In the Danish context, this idea finds its expression through the common exclamation that we must ‘fight the no mistakes culture’. The key idea here is that we are haunted by a culture that expects perfection and must emancipate ourselves from this oppressive demand.
This ‘pro-failure’ culture – as we might call it - is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a broader movement towards a society based on the values of American west-coast entrepreneurialism. The logic of this movement is that excellence is about acting as a well-balanced explore-exploit algorithm. By testing different business models – and pivoting when these don’t work out – entrepreneurs seek to find that one idea, product, or service that will make them successful. In this school of thought, entrepreneurs need to adopt the bon mot, ascribed (likely wrongful) to Churchill of “success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” One needs to keep searching and adapting until the breakthrough business model is found. This explicitly entails not sticking to any one idea or professional community but being willing to abandon it as soon as it seems less viable than another option. Therefore, accepting failure becomes an integral part of doing business – it is simply part of being in ‘exploration mode’.
As such, the pro-failure attitude is simultaneously a financial and mental strategy – accepting failure is economically rational and therefore we need the mental tools to handle this. The question is if the pro-failure movement and its underlying entrepreneurial values are as benign as they seem or entail their own dangers.
We need support to succeed, not license to fail
A few years ago, then Danish Minister of Education Tommy Ahlers, launched a campaign to fight the ‘no mistakes culture’ in the educational sector. “We can only create something and learn something new if we are prepared to fail”, said Ahlers when he launched the new initiative. The idea was that both students and teachers-to-be should learn to make failure socially acceptable and that this would combat the high level of stress among the youth. However, the initiative was launched at the same time as the educational institutions had to cut costs by 2% each year and students lamented that their teachers did not have sufficient time for providing feedback. Students and teachers-to-be didn’t get more support in their studies. Instead, they were given a lecture on failure acceptance.
This reveals a potential dark side to the idea of embracing failure. Rather than addressing the structural causes for students experiencing stress or failure – such as too little support or too many students – Ahlers essentially asked students to be better at dealing with stress associated with failure by embracing it.
Once we consider the fact that we quite obviously prefer resources to succeed rather than for failure to be acceptable, it becomes apparent that the pro-failure culture is missing a key point – that, to most people, to live with continuous failure is a kind of cruelty. The opportunity to be good at something – maybe even master it - is an important component of human flourishing. By trying to master something, we enter a caring relation with our surroundings, whether it be in the form of the careful interaction a nurse has with a patient or the careful interaction an auditor has with a balance sheet. Furthermore, mastery is almost always a fundamentally social undertaking; mastery is judged in relation to a social codex, and seeking to master a field is to join in a shared world with teachers, historical figures who have shaped it, and others who seek to master it. This social aspect is deepened by the fact that mastering something is almost always done by acquiring a set of supporting virtues in addition to mere technical skills. For example, the virtue of empathy and communication might be cultivated in the training of social workers and nurses and the virtues of objectivity and accuracy might be cultivated in the training of auditors. In this way, building mastery is a way of entering into a community formed around that field.
The pro-failure movement undercuts mastery
The problem with the pro-failure culture, then, is that for non-entrepreneurs, normalizing failure undercuts, rather than supports, mastery and hence human flourishing.
Mastering being a teacher or doctor takes years and dedication to achieve and will entail – I speculate – carefully honing a set of professional skills rather than trying out ten different ways of teaching a pupil or treating a patient (imagine!) to find out what works. Moving fast and experimenting wildly may be as little part of their professional social codex as it is part of the entrepreneurial one.
However, if the pro-failure maxim is taken to be universal, teachers or doctors who raise concerns of not having time or resources to perform their job properly may be taken to be too risk-adverse (i.e. afraid of failure, as we saw in the with Ahlers) or not be sufficiently innovative.
If we do not build a culture that supports professions that require the careful honing of skills rather than the fail-fast mindset, we both risk losing the productive fruits of such types of mastery but also alienating those professions. If we form a society that only cultivates entrepreneurial values, we remove the foundation for other skill-based communities and professional identities – and a society that lets this happen is missing the opportunity to provide a scarce good indeed. Many political writers1 have lamented the death of communities in the Western world. They point to the decline in the part that the church, local community, or unions play in people’s lives and the adverse outcomes that this has led to. It is therefore important to have a culture that not only accepts failures but actively underpins people’s chances of nurturing mastery of skills and participating in skill-based communities.
Tropes to kill to start taking mastery seriously
What we need is a work ethic of skill cultivation rather than one of speed. Such a culture should still be accepting of failure as a natural part of life and work and see the positive sides of accepting failure when innovating. However, it should disperse a number of cultural phenomena that the pro-failure movement has instilled. Take two examples of such cultural tropes that should be dismantled:
Firstly, the idea of so-called “imposter syndrome.” The term is used to coin the experience some people have of being “imposters” in their professional setting; that they have somehow cheated to get to where they are and are not equipped with the proper skills to handle their role. The remedy prescribed to these people has close ties to the pro-failure logic. The person suffering from the syndrome is usually told to “rewrite their mental process” or “rephrase failure as a learning possibility.” The outset always seems to be that this is either a psychological problem, a lack of rationality, or both. The person who feels they are insufficiently competent for a job does so because they are setting the bar irrationally high, don’t have a rational appraisal of their own abilities, or is not willing to take enough risks. In other words, this approach treats the imposter syndrome as pathological.
Rarely, the more obvious conclusion is drawn; that perhaps a lot of people are feeling that they don’t have the necessary resources to do their job as well as they would like – because they don’t! Rather than imagining that we are in some age of irrational self-doubt, it seems far more likely to me that with the current experience of acceleration and the ever-increasing push to be more productive, lots of people are in fact pushed to be imposters, not out of volition but necessity. Rather than solving this problem, the pro-failure culture effectively covers it up by making it into a problem of lack of risk willingness, and learning possibilities, alienating the people who experience this from their own – likely sound – judgment.
Those who lament the damaging effects of imposter syndrome often point to the fact that it hits women harder than men, showing the problem to be connected to systemic gender inequalities. However, studies in behavioral economics suggest that women systematically suffer less from overconfidence bias than men. Rather than being plagued by society imposing some irrational level of self-doubt on women, does it then not seem more likely that women in fact have a clearer understanding of their own limitations, which their male counterparts lack? If so, we are clearly doing women suffering from imposter syndrome a disservice by double-alienating them from their own experience, first by suggesting that their self-doubt is irrational and then by suggesting their experience of such self-doubt is self-deception.
A culture of skill cultivation would take people’s experience of being imposters seriously. On an organizational plane, self-doubt about own abilities should lead to questions of how we can up-skill such individuals, not therapeutical remarks around being risk-willing and open to accepting failure. This does not mean that we should not do our utmost to fight under-confidence and support people in having faith in their own skill set, but that this ought to be followed up by engaging with people to build the skills they would need to succeed and have a feeling of mastery of their field. On a political level, it means that the rhetoric around failure acceptance should be met with some degree of skepticism if it’s not followed up with resources to make people succeed, as we saw in the case of Ahlers.
The second example is the idea of having to move outside of one’s comfort zone constantly. The basics of this idea is that if we do not constantly push ourselves to try new things that make us uncomfortable, we cannot learn or innovate. As with the idea of imposter syndrome, it’s closely connected with the pro-failure logic in that it celebrates taking on risks and failing in order to learn. Also, as with the pro-failure culture, its starting point is very sympathetic – to help people overcome debilitating barriers by conquering their own insecurities. However, as a general cultural credo, this can be damaging. Trying new stuff for its own sake might make sense in the entrepreneurial setting discussed above, where it’s essential to make something truly innovative to build a sustainable competitive advantage. However, many fields don’t function like that and instead draw from a tradition that informs its practices. If a field has had a sufficiently long tradition resulting in an accumulated body of knowledge and if the comfort zone of a practitioner is set up around staying within that tradition, it might be perfectly rational for that practitioner to do so. In such a field the most important thing is not to find new ways of doing things, but to look to the tradition to solve the task at hand.
Take another example from the Danish context. In the last two decades, there has been a widespread digitalization of the Danish elementary school. Throughout this development, many have proclaimed that the Danish elementary school needed to incorporate computers and tablets to prepare the kids for the digital age, resulting in some municipalities buying iPads for all their teachers and pupils. Many of the people spreading the digitalization gospel were representative of IT corporations and as such outside the field of teaching. On the other hand, some teachers and researchers had a more skeptical opinion about digitalization. Now, research points to serious detrimental effects of the use of digital tools in schools. Perhaps the teachers who were concerned with this development should have claimed their right to stay in their comfort zone?
The reason that we often celebrate people who try new approaches is likely linked to what Nassim Taleb has described as the invisibility of the graveyard; we most often remember what is gained from these experiments and tend to forget all the failed and costly mistakes. We see the people who moved fast, but not the things they broke. However, to enable people to flourish, we need a culture that also support a professional ethos of caring skill cultivation rather than creative destruction.
Joachim Skanderby Johansen is a regular writer at Unreasonable Doubt. He writes on the ethics and practicalities of responsibility and uncertainty. He occasionally defends dead liberal ideas. Joachim works in the financial sector. He has a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Copenhagen Business School.
If you liked this article, you might also like our post on the dangers of artificial mediocrity.
See e.g. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton and The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel