After losing another Starship rocket this week, 10 minutes after lift-off, Elon Musk’s SpaceX published a 400-word statement. It contains eight direct references to the success of the mission, during which the most powerful rocket ever launched reached space for the first time, albeit briefly. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn,” concluded the statement.
Musk is the foremost proponent of an experimental culture of “Take risks. Learn by blowing things up. Revise. Repeat”, to quote Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur. After an earlier launch ended in “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, Musk declared: “We don’t want to design to eliminate every risk. Otherwise, we will never get anywhere.”
The world’s richest man is adding rocket fuel to an abundant literature that urges innovators to celebrate and embrace misfires, setbacks and flops. Such books, with their endless previews of what you’re about to read, bullet-points of what you’ve just read, and recaps of what you should have learnt, rarely take flight. Occasionally, though, some of them make it into orbit.
Right Kind of Wrong, Amy Edmondson’s excellent new guide to how to promote “intelligent failures” and learn from them, is one. She is on a mission to eliminate “glib talk about failure”, and clear up confusion about what constitutes “the right kind of wrong”. Her message is relevant not only to Silicon Valley bros, but also to anyone who has worked in any organisation, from hospitals (where Edmondson started her research) to consultancies.
As she writes, “The failure craze — the ‘fail fast, fail often’ culture that wants us to embrace failure seemingly indiscriminately — takes inspiration from the intelligent failures inherent to innovation but risks glossing over the vast and varied failure landscape, which also includes basic and complex failure.”
Recognition that failure should be discussed openly ought in itself to be a positive sign. Jim Collins, a bestselling business author, once told me that the favourite among his books was How the Mighty Fall (2009), in which he advised companies how to stave off decline. But its sales had suffered, he said, from the fact that “people don’t like to read about failure”.
Despite that old publishing rule of thumb, these seem to be good times for books about fiascos, meltdowns and blunders. Perhaps the pandemic — “an immense complex failure”, according to Edmondson — has prompted a healthy interest in why things go wrong and how to learn from disaster.
Right Kind of Wrong provides a useful template and taxonomy for failing well, but Edmondson proves as merciless as you might expect a Harvard professor to be about those who take the old move-fast-and-break-things mantras on failure as an excuse to skimp on their homework.
She makes clear that it is right to try to eliminate basic failures, from accidentally putting the milk into the cupboard rather than the fridge, to ruining an experiment with poor pipette-technique. Where things go wrong also matters, though.
Edmondson distinguishes, for instance, between consistent, variable and novel contexts. When an Air Florida crew absent-mindedly approved the disabling of anti-ice instruments in wintry conditions in 1982, they committed a basic failure in a variable context: it led to the flight’s fatal crash into the frozen Potomac river. Similarly, we would rightly expect a high level of success from modern heart surgeons while understanding that they stand on the shoulders of pioneering predecessors’ policy of thoughtful experimentation.
The real targets of Edmondson’s criticism are organisations that suppress and demonise intelligent failures that can advance understanding. The subtitle of the US edition of Edmondson’s book is The Science of Failing Well, because “a 70 per cent failure rate . . . is not atypical for scientists at the top of their field”. In novel contexts, it is possible to experiment, as the first heart surgeons did, and learn from intelligent failures.
Musk does not merit a mention in Edmondson’s book, but he features strongly in Andrew McAfee’s The Geek Way, another strong addition to the genre. This is not strictly speaking a book about failure, but a distillation and examination of the culture promoted by Musk and others: “Vocal and egalitarian . . . they’re not afraid to fail, challenge the boss, or be proven wrong”.
McAfee, who started his research at Harvard and now works nearby at MIT, disparages business schools. But he and Edmondson have much in common. In identifying science, ownership, speed and openness as the keys to geek culture, he draws strongly on Edmondson’s groundbreaking work on “psychological safety”, for instance.
Psychologically safe organisations ensure that colleagues are not afraid to call out failures and mistakes for the greater good of the team. A classic and tragic recent case of an organisation suffering from low psychological safety was Boeing. In emails that came to light after the complex failure that led to the 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019, one engineer wrote about “a suppressive cultural attitude towards criticism of corporate policy — especially if that criticism comes as a result of fatal accidents”.
By contrast, Edmondson extols the Andon cord developed by carmaker Toyota, which any member of a production line team can pull to signal a problem to their supervisor. Sixty seconds elapse while the team works out whether the problem can be easily fixed and, if not, the whole line is paused. Eleven out of 12 pulls are false alarms but, Edmondson explains, even those are used as a prompt — “a welcome education on how things go wrong and how to adjust so as to reduce that possibility”.
A second link is that both writers studied under Chris Argyris, who identified two organisational models. Companies operating Model 1 aim to maintain control, strive to win, and suppress negative feelings — the attitudes that led, among other disasters, to the disintegration of Arthur Andersen, triggered by the auditor’s part in the scandal that brought down Enron in 2001. Model 2 presents a more challenging but potentially more rewarding path, which “starts with a willingness to discover your shortcomings”, in Edmondson’s words.
McAfee associates the first approach with old-style industrial companies that defend the status quo and quash dissent. By contrast, he identifies a willingness to fail at the heart of the culture fostered by fast-moving technology companies such as Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla, or Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.
Traits common to these leaders and teams include an ability to “iterate” rapidly, developing products in repeated “sprints”, and to shut down projects that are going nowhere. Sometimes, a setback prompts a “pivot” to an entirely different market: YouTube started as a video dating site, Instagram launched as a location-based game, and Pinterest was once a mobile shopping app.
An executive at Takeda tells Edmondson that instead of celebrating failure, which “implies a . . . bad ending”, the Japanese pharmaceutical company likes to celebrate when it pivots.
Another trait common to fail-fast leaders is that they are still mostly white men. As Edmondson points out, “failure can also be seen as a privilege”, and ethnic minorities, women and other under-represented groups often “lack the luxury of failing unobtrusively”.
McAfee’s contention is that geek companies succeed by harnessing human beings’ inclination towards sociability. He forms this into a clunky “ultimate geek ground rule” that underpins all such companies’ success: “to shape the ultrasociality of group members so that the group’s cultural evolution is as rapid as possible in the desired direction”. Patrick Collison, chief executive of payments company Stripe, puts it more pithily. When asked what sort of behaviour would depress him if he witnessed it at his company, he responds: “Anything that one would categorise as antisocial rather than prosocial.”
To free teams to behave in this co-operative way, says McAfee, leaders have to work constantly to “remove the excess overhead and structure” that burden growing companies with unnecessary bureaucracy and encourage innovation-sapping internal politicking.
Geek culture is not found only in technology companies, of course. But McAfee cites evidence, drawn from analyses of corporate culture by researchers Don and Charlie Sull, that “tech giants” and internet companies such as Netflix, Apple and Amazon outscore other sectors on agility, innovation and execution.
The question is how to sustain such leadership. Once-nimble Microsoft nearly imploded under the weight of its own bureaucracy until Satya Nadella took over and initiated a sharp change in mindset. Netflix has fought in the past year to recover from a subscription slowdown. Facebook owner Meta is cited in The Geek Way as an example of a company sliding towards the defensiveness outlined in Argyris’s Model 1.
Beyond Silicon Valley, Ray Dalio of Bridgewater, applauded in both books for the radical transparency policy at his hedge fund group, has come under attack for presiding over a dysfunctional organisation (allegations that he denies). Academic science is itself undergoing a punishing round of self-criticism about alleged failings. Even Musk seems to be falling prey to overconfidence in his ownership of social media group X.
But even if some of the companies or leaders they cite may fade, McAfee and Edmondson have pinpointed some important norms sustaining the world’s most admired, and fastest growing, organisations. Culture is often dismissed as a “soft” corporate trait, difficult to evaluate, let alone change. A defective or restrictive culture can, however, have hard, sometimes even fatal, consequences for those touched by it, whether they are nurses and their patients, pilots and their passengers, or lawyers and their clients.
These books underline that openness, challenge, experimentation and intelligent failure provide a solid launch pad for sensible risk-taking. It is no coincidence that these are also the principles of good science, which remains, to quote McAfee, “the best process we’ve ever come up with for being less wrong over time”.
Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive by Amy Edmondson Cornerstone Press £22/Atria Books $28.99, 368 pages
The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results by Andrew McAfee Macmillan Business £22/Little, Brown and Company $30, 336 pages
Andrew Hill is senior business writer at the FT
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