Time to learn from failure

25 Feb 2016 | Viewpoint
From outright farce while on field work, to rejected grant applications, missing the primary endpoint in a clinical trial and the prototype that did not fly – the mishaps, the unexpected and the unwanted results - should be a source of learning

Last year Agata Staniewicz, a conservation biologist at Bristol University, took to Twitter to tell the world she had accidentally glued herself to a crocodile while attaching a radio transmitter to its back.

Andy Baader, an archaeologist at Glasgow University, got excited when he found bones in a trench. He later admitted finding a KFC wrapper nearby.

Both were contributing to #fieldworkfails, a hashtag which invited scientists to come clean on some of their most farcical research attempts.

Of course, science is a world where such candour is not encouraged.

The notion that gaffes can be good is perhaps more accepted in the business world, where a cottage industry has grown up around failure.

As one case in point, at FailCon, a post mortem series that began in San Francisco, bruised entrepreneurs and investors spill their blunders to a room. There’s the guy whose crowdfunding campaigns flamed out after hitting only 10 per cent of its funding target. The roster of dead start-ups grows a little bigger and people go for a round of drinks.

By contrast, there have been fewer serious efforts to lift the curtain on flops in the research world. Perhaps scientists need their own FailCon.

A few journals ask for and publish negative studies — to prevent repetition and waste, but also to acknowledge that even negative results add value to the collective knowledge bank – but the focus has historically been on reporting positive findings.

It is easy to understand why people might downplay or simply hide their mistakes. Pride, politics and good old competition all play a part.

Evading the question

Most of us have been asked in a job interview to talk about a time when we failed. There is a broad consensus on what you should do next: evade the question by subtly steering the questioner to a discussion on strengths instead.

In contrast, the Finnish company Supercell has put failure at the core of its approach. Instead of brushing problems under the carpet, the computer games maker drags them into the open. When a new game does not perform well during testing, the team behind it is called to stand in front of the whole company and discuss their mistakes.

Then somebody pops champagne as a little acknowledgement that says well done for trying. It is also a gentle invitation to dust yourself down and get back on the horse.

Let’s face it, there are many who could benefit from this type of analysis. 

Every day, scientists somewhere are opening their email to find the funding application they spent endless hours on has been savaged by evaluators.

Europe is continually criticised for its failure to extract the commercial and economic benefits of its world leading science. Amongst the most iconic failures, in 1975 researchers at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge created the first monoclonal antibody, a landmark later rewarded with a Nobel Prize. But the commercial potential was not appreciated, and the door was left open for American entrepreneurs to come in and export the technique.  

During the 1980s and 1990s German scientists at Erlangen-Nuremberg University and the Fraunhofer Institute devised the most popular format for digital music on the Internet, MP3. Again, there was disarray over commercialisation, leaving Germany to watch from the side lines as giants like Apple carved up a multi-billion euro market.

Spilling the beans

It’s often said that Silicon Valley’s success is tied to its unique relationship to failure. There is research that says, among people who are willing to try again, the odds of success rise.

In Europe, fear of failure is frequently cited as stifling entrepreneurship. More openness about why start-ups failed would both reduce the stigma and allow everyone to learn the lessons.

So in the spirit of #fieldworkfails, Science|Business wants to know: What have you failed at recently?

Has some promising new research hit a dead end and fizzled out? Are you still waiting to win a grant from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research programme after the fifth attempt? Did you dither too long and lose out on patenting a new discovery? Has your brilliant idea failed to translate into a workable prototype?

And most importantly, what have you learned as a result?

Write to [email protected] to share the blunders and highlight the lessons learned.

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