10/04/2024
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Atypical child’s bedroom is a shrine dedicated to failure. There’s the guitar gathering dust in the corner, the unfinished books forever shelved, the two-sizes-too-small karate gi hanging in the closet, and the magic set where half the contents disappeared (never to reappear). Each one a sacrifice to the hobbies and subjects that were tried, failed at, and ultimately abandoned.
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And that’s great! Children come into the world with a need to explore and experiment, and we understand that failure will be an inevitable part of their growth. However, at some point — usually between high school and adulthood — we lose the sense that failure is a necessary part of achievement.
“There is a deep-rooted belief in our culture that success means never failing. That failure is unacceptable. That if I fail, it means there’s something wrong with me,” Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School, tells Big Think. “Of course, that’s nonsense. We all make mistakes, and failure is part of the journey towards success.”
Edmondson has studied failure in its various forms and reached the conclusion that there are three distinct ways to fail. Understanding the difference can help us rediscover how to fail in ways that are beneficial, less costly, and maybe even exciting.
The types of failure to avoid
The first type of failure is “basic failure.” Such slip-ups occur from carelessness, distraction, exhaustion, or any number of other attention-snatching scenarios. They can include a typo in an office-wide memo, forgetting your mom’s birthday, or reaching for the salt instead of the sugar when baking a pie.
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Typically, basic failures lead to pint-sized consequences and easy fixes. Your team members razz you for the typo, and you correct it. You apologize to your mom and buy her an extra special gift. You throw out the pie and bake another (but not before labeling your kitchen containers).
