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Intelligent failure
An intelligent failure is the right kind of wrong. It’s where new knowledge and discovery come from. There are four criteria for calling a failure intelligent. Criterion number one: it’s in new territory. We don’t yet have the knowledge we need to produce a success. Criterion two: it’s in pursuit of an opportunity whether that’s learning a new sport or discovering a new molecule. Number three: it is hypothesis-driven, meaning you’ve put some thought into it. You’ve done your homework. You’re not just throwing darts at the wall. And the fourth criterion: it’s as small as possible to still allow the learning. You don’t bet more resources or time or money than you can comfortably spare on something uncertain.
Recognize the stakes
I believe that it is a good idea to increase the frequency of intelligent failures that you experience in your life. What does that really mean? Intelligent failures are essentially the results of an experiment. An experiment where you don’t yet know for sure what the result will be. One of the things that holds us back from taking risks from experimenting is that we erroneously think the stakes are too high. We think if we get it wrong, it’ll be awful. When in reality, if we get it wrong, it’s just wrong. Sometimes it’s inconvenient, almost always disappointing, but it’s not awful, it’s just new knowledge. So we have to remind ourselves accurately what the stakes are.
Roughly speaking, stakes can be high or low. High-stakes are things that might involve a large amount of money or a risk of injury, or worse, a risk of death. Those are things where we will proceed very cautiously and carefully so as to minimize the risk of failure. So, for example, in aviation, you learn and experiment with new moves in a simulator, not in a real flight with real passengers. In healthcare, the same is true. We experiment in the lab. We don’t experiment at the bedside. And so, it’s really important to be aware of the context and what’s appropriate in that context for failure.
Most of us, if we were on a national television program, doing something that was core to our identity, we would feel awful if we made a mistake. Not Julia Child, the famous chef who would often have a mistake during her show as she’s cooking an omelet or baking a chicken. And something would go wrong, and she would just laugh and say, “No problem. Just, you know, pick it up off the counter. No one saw you do it. No big deal.” She rightly I would say, coded the situation of being on a national television program, cooking an omelet as low-stakes. But it is. It’s just an omelet, right? Who cares if it falls on the counter? Whereas I think most of us would inaccurately code that situation as just catastrophic if we made a mistake like that in front of such a large audience. The reality is Julia was right and we would be wrong. So all of us can benefit by reminding ourselves of the true rational-stakes of a situation.
Think like a scientist
If you want to have more intelligent failures in your life, in your work, that means, essentially, you have to think like a scientist. You have to sit down and say, one: what is it I’m really hoping to do? What’s the progress I’d really love to make? And what do I know currently about how to achieve that goal? And just as importantly, what do I not know? That’s a gap that you now want to figure out how to close. So then you ask yourself, what might I try next to see what will happen? So you’re thinking very carefully about your knowledge and identifying where the unknowns are and then in as efficient a way as possible.
You’re going to try to eliminate some of the unknowns by developing new knowledge. More simply, you’re going to experiment with something. Now, you could be experimenting with a new hairstyle or you could be experimenting with a chemical compound, but you’re going to experiment with something that you’re not 100% sure will work. You believe there’s a high likelihood it might work because you’ve done your homework. It seems worth conducting the experiment, but you remind yourself in advance, it may not work and that’ll be okay, too.