It’s often said that ‘failure is a treasure trove of learning’. But the fact is many organisations claiming to ‘embrace’ failure are actually still ruled by fear of it. They’re reluctant to acknowledge mistakes, let alone examine them.

The first barrier

The first step in learning from failure is simple. In theory. It’s to admit that we’ve made a mistake. But, as Matthew Syed notes, admitting failure is difficult because it threatens our self-image. It hurts our pride. We want to be seen as somebody who’s always reliable. Who never gets it wrong.

So our psychological defence mechanisms spring into action, and instead of facing the mistake, we unconsciously rewrite the story to protect ourselves. Very often, people who say they didn’t get something wrong are not lying — they are simply editing reality in a way that allows them to remain the hero of the story.

Courage

Professor Thomas J. DeLong of the Harvard Business School expresses a similar idea in Flying Without a Net. He writes that, ‘real change requires the courage — and commitment — to acknowledge our own mistakes.’

His message is simple: stop looking outward for somebody to blame, and pause long enough to ask, ‘What part of this may have come from me?’ The first step in learning from failure is not finding fault in others or in the work environment: it’s having the courage to look honestly at ourselves.

But that’s only the first step. There’s still more to do.

Question the system

People analysing failure often use such tools as the ‘Five Whys’ to trace the root causes of a problem. It works by repeatedly asking ‘why’ something has gone wrong, each time directing the current ‘why’ to the answer of the previous ‘why’. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys for a fuller explanation.)

But focusing only on immediate causes isn’t enough. What really matters is identifying the structural causes behind them. Imagine a product defect traced back to a faulty component. The answer might lie in the wrong materials being chosen, or in poor quality manufacturing quality. But that’s missing the point. The real question is: Why wasn’t the defect detected before the product reached customers?

The answer lies not in the part — but in the system that allowed the fault to pass right through it unchanged.

Narrow thinking

Unfortunately, too many companies stop short when learning lessons from failure by coming up with a series of procedures. For example:

• Use this material under these conditions.
• Follow this quality guideline in similar situations.

It’s an approach that may well increase efficiency — but it also narrows thinking. It prevents something going wrong at the surface level while leaving the underlying structure untouched.

If a company is truly going to learn from its mistakes, it’s going to have to re-design a faulty system. And to re-examine its systems, it first has to take a hard, honest look at the problem. It has to ask what really happened. And what didn’t happen.

It’s at this point, though, that the greatest obstacle emerges — human psychology.

Blocking learning

As I noted earlier, admitting failure hurts our pride. We resist acknowledging our mistakes and tend to reinterpret events. Crucially, we rarely notice that we are doing it. This, as social psychologist Leon Festinger observed, is ‘cognitive dissonance’, a phenomenon that works as follows.

‘When people hold conflicting beliefs or information,’ he wrote, ‘they experience discomfort — and reduce it by altering their perceptions or actions.’

So when the belief, ’I am competent’, clashes with the reality of ‘I failed’, our minds instinctively protect the former — by modifying our memory or interpretation of the situation. In other words: Human beings are, by nature, poor analysts of their own failures. And not only do they give the wrong answers – they often also ask the wrong questions.

The right questions

Investigators often unconsciously frame questions around an expected conclusion. They steer the enquiry, again unconsciously, toward confirming prior assumptions. And when conducting interviews, they fail to separate personal memories from existing opinions. 

That said, attempts to remain neutral can also lead to blind spots: it can too easily become passivity. And a too passive interviewer may avoid asking a painful, but ultimately insightful, question. The right questions require curiosity, the courage to ask them, and the skill to interpret them correctly. Simply documenting a failure won’t help anybody.

Valuable learning

So what does all this boil down to? It’s this. If we’re to make full use of failure, then we have to move past the psychological and organisational barriers standing in the way. Doing that requires three essential qualities:

1. The courage to acknowledge our own errors.
2. The discipline to question failures in the system — not just the failure itself.
3. The wisdom to recognise how emotion and bias can distort perception.

Failure may  well offer a treasury of insight, but the keys that unlock it are clarity of thought, courage to ask the right questions, and an honest, unflinching gaze at the answers.