We cannot succeed simply by not failing

From The Up Side of Down by Megan McArdle.

McArdle is a critical thinker with a gift for phrasing and explication. I particularly enjoy her blog at Bloomsberg. She has just published her first book and so far I am enjoying it. I keep having to mark passages. So many that it makes little sense to wait till I finish the book. Here is her central thesis.

Our declining ability to take risks, and to bounce back when things don't work or, is already beginning to play out. New firms, which have long been the engine of economic innovation and growth, aren't being created as fast as they once were. Laid-off workers aren't being reabsorbed by the job market. We are frozen, unable to tell whether the light we're staring into is the end of the tunnel or an oncoming train.

There's better way to do this. Since we cannot succeed simply by not failing, we should stop spending so much energy trying to avoid failure or engineer it away. Instead, we should embrace it - smartly. We should encourage people to fail early and often- by making sure that their failures are learning opportunities, not catastrophes. Unfortunately, schools don't teach failure. But maybe they should.

What would such a school teach? It would bring back high monkey bars and let kids learn that the price of reaching lofty heights is the occasional broken arm. It would not try to pretend that there are no wrong answers. Instead of protecting kids from failure, teachers would encourage them to face it, early and often, on sports teams, in the classroom, and in the lab. They'd help kids overcome their natural fear of failure, because failure is often the best - and sometimes the only - way to learn.

[snip]

That means learning to identify mistakes early, so they can be corrected. And it means recognizing when you are on the wrong path. It sounds simple, but the architecture of our brains makes it much harder than you think. We invest in our commitments, mentally and emotionally, and have a very hard time letting go. That is in part what made it so hard for GM to turn around, and why so many of us stay in bad relationships when we know we should move on.

Learning to fail well means learning to understand your mistakes, because unless you know what went wrong, you may do the wrong things to correct it. Some kinds of mistakes require punishment or censure; others are just the natural errors we'd expect to occur as the result of doing something we're not very good at yet. Mistaking one for the other can be disastrous.

Most of all, learning to fail well means overcoming our natural instincts to blame someone - maybe ourselves - whenever something goes wrong. Societies and people fail best when they err on the side of forgiveness. Not forgetting: the information gained by failing is far too valuable to be lost by pretending that nothing happened. Rather, they recognize the past failure, and then they try to let it go, to always be looking toward a better future.