Today, we’re talking about failure. And no, this is not an autobiographical episode. Instead, we’re talking about the science of failure
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, it’s Jeff again and this is lesson number 635 of Plain English on Thursday, December 21, 2023. If you celebrate Christmas, I hope you’ve gotten your shopping done. By the time you hear this, I’ll be in Chicago, catching up with JR, the producer, making plans, strategizing, plotting for 2024.
Hopefully 2024 will be full of success for us, for you, but it will also have some failures, as every year does. We are only human. And in today’s story, we’re going to talk about failure, the science of mistakes and failure. We’re going to put failures into six categories, ranging from blameworthy to virtuous. And by knowing, and naming, the types of failure, we can understand our own shortcomings better.
In the second half of the lesson, we’ll talk about the expression “root cause” and we have a song of the week. Let’s get started.
Six ways to fail
Often , when something goes wrong, our first instinct is to look for someone or something to blame. This didn’t go well: whose fault is it? Who can we blame?
That might not always be the best way to look at it. And even when you do want to find the root cause of a failure, it might not be a person; it could be a system instead. To properly address and correct mistakes and failures, it helps to categorize them.
I’m reading a book now called “Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well ” by Amy Edmondson, a Harvard professor. And in the book, she presents six kinds of failure and puts them on a spectrum.
On one side are blameworthy failures—things that are clearly someone’s fault—while on the other end are virtuous failures—failures that are a good thing. What kind of failure could be virtuous? Let’s walk through them one at a time and you’ll see.
The first kind of failure is “sabotage.” Sabotage is when someone purposely does something wrong or does something that is clearly dangerous or reckless. One example the author gives is someone who soaks a rag in lighter fluid and sets a house on fire. This is a purposeful attempt to cause damage. Or think of an airline pilot that goes to work drunk. This is a reckless act. Both are examples of sabotage, the most blameworthy type of failure: you can point the finger at one person and assign blame.
The next type of failure is inattention. Picture a driver on the highway. He looks away from the road to answer a text, or browse the web, and he crashes into another car and injures another driver. This is inattention: the driver should have prevented the crash but he didn’t because he wasn’t paying attention. In this case, the driver deserves some blame. His decision led to a bad outcome, even though he didn’t mean it.
Inability is the third type of failure. “Inability” means, a person fails at something because he or she simply doesn’t have the skills or the ability to succeed. In the early days of Plain English, I did everything on the web site myself: this was a case study in the “inability” type of failure! I was not—I am not—a computer programmer, and so I was trying to do things that I simply didn’t have the ability to do. The web site was slow, it would crash, things wouldn’t work. I was paying attention; I just didn’t have the skills, the ability to do the job.
The next type of failure is a “task challenge.” This means that someone is attempting something that is very difficult, and you can’t expect success every time. In the early days of ChatGPT , for example, the program would produce some really weird stuff—it even tried to convince a reporter to divorce his wife!
But think about this for a second. Yes, this was a failure. The program didn’t produce the content that the creators intended. But cut them some slack! Making an artificial intelligence chatbot is hard!
Training a computer to answer questions: it had never been done before, not like this. So yes, there were some failures, if only because the challenge was so hard. This is an example of a failure that is less blameworthy. You can’t blame someone for failing at something so difficult.
Next is uncertainty. The world is random and can’t always be predicted. A company launches a new product: will people like it? A company can do a lot of research and preparation. But the only way to know for sure is to try it and find out.
A friend sets you up on a blind date: will the date go well? If it doesn’t go well, that can feel like a failure. But it’s a failure because the world is random and uncertain. It wasn’t a mistake to launch the product, it wasn’t a mistake to go on the date.
And then the final type of failure is experimentation. You recognize that you must fail on the way to success. The only way to get to success is by trying a lot of things that won’t work out. And that kind of failure is praiseworthy. Think of scientific experiments: to develop a drug that treats a disease, hundreds of experiments have to fail before the researchers can land on the one that works.
So when something goes wrong in life, as it definitely will, either for you or for the people around you, think about what kind of failure it was.
Was it sabotage or inattention? Then maybe you do assign blame. Was it inability? Or just a hard task? In that case, maybe you need to adjust your approach or your expectations. But was the failure caused by the randomness of the universe? Or was it the result of experimentation? If it’s one of those two, then maybe you deserve a pat on the back.
So now I’m thinking about things that have gone wrong for me and I’m trying to put them on the spectrum. This really does help think through challenges.
It can be hard to find where to put a failure, though. Self-driving cars that crash—this is a great example. A self-driving car, if it ever really happens, would be an incredible feat for humanity. Clearly there will be failures along the way! This is a task challenge, mixed with uncertainty and experimentation. It’s just a hard thing to do.
But also, the companies have a responsibility to make sure that the self-driving cars aren’t putting people in unnecessary danger. So if a self-driving car crashes and hurts or (God forbid) kills someone—is it because it just encountered a unique situation? Or did the company rush the car to the market? Did the company—like I think Tesla does —did the company advertise the car as self-driving when really it needed the driver’s attention?
Lots to think about! And hopefully you can think about it in English!
By the way, the book one more time: “Right Kind of Wrong” by Amy Edmondson . I put a link to it in the transcript at PlainEnglish.com/635
JR’s song of the week
Today’s song of the week is “Sweet Disposition” by the Temper Trap. They are an Australian band. A person’s “disposition” is their way of acting, their way of being. So a “sweet disposition” is like a sweet way of acting. The Temper Trap, “Sweet Disposition” is the song of the week, thank you JR.
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