We tend to think of tragedies as a single terrible moment, rather than the result of multiple bad decisions. Can this pattern be reversed? We try — with stories about wildfires, school shootings, and love. SOURCES:Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership management at Harvard Business School.Helen Fisher, former senior research fellow at The Kinsey Institute and former chief science advisor to Match.com.Ed Galea, founding director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich.Gary Klein, cognitive psychologist and pioneer in the field of naturalistic decision making.David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database.Aaron Stark, head cashier at Lowe's and keynote speaker.John Van Reenen, professor at the London School of Economics. RESOURCES:"Ethan Crumbley: Parents of Michigan school gunman sentenced to at least 10 years," by Brandon Drenon (New York Times, 2024).Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, by Amy Edmondson (2023)."How Fire Turned Lahaina Into a Death Trap," by Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Serge F. Kovaleski, Shawn Hubler, and Riley Mellen (The New York Times, 2023).The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, by Jillian Peterson and James Densley (2021)."I Was Almost A School Shooter," by Aaron Stark (TEDxBoulder, 2018). EXTRAS: "Is Perfectionism Ruining Your Life?" by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023)."Why Did You Marry That Person?" by Freakonomics Radio (2022)."What Do We Really Learn From Failure?" by No Stupid Questions (2021)."How to Fail Like a Pro," by Freakonomics Radio (2019)."Failure Is Your Friend," by Freakonomics Radio (2014).
Chapter 1: What makes failure a great teacher?
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. I'm sure you've heard people say that failure is a great teacher, but how? How does that work? What do we learn from failure that prevents more of the same? How do we not let fear of failure keep us from trying things? We tried to answer those questions and many more in a series we first published in 2023. I thought it was worth publishing again.
So today you will hear part one. We've updated facts and figures as necessary. As always, thanks for listening. In August of 2023, on a Monday morning, the National Weather Service issued a warning of high winds in Maui County, Hawaii. By the next morning, the wind was gusting at over 70 miles an hour. Here's how one resident described it.
Chapter 2: What happened during the Lahaina wildfire?
Tiles are getting ripped off roofs, leaving exposed rooftops with bare wood everywhere. Power lines are like spaghetti strings everywhere.
The island started to lose electricity, and near the town of Lahaina, there was a brush fire. Firefighters arrived, and it was soon declared contained. But later that day, the high winds caused a flare-up.
We could see the smoke, and all of a sudden, oh my gosh, the quickness with which it happened was the craziest part. It was just so fast.
What happened next, you have probably read about or seen in horrifying videos and news coverage. The town of Lahaina was swallowed by fire. People tried to flee in their cars, but the roads were clogged. Some people jumped in the ocean to escape. Here is one survivor.
And we were in the ocean probably like eight hours, fighting the water, getting pulled out, flames were hitting you still. Things were falling from the palm tree on fire on you.
By the time the fire was out, 102 people had died. More than 2,000 buildings had been destroyed, most of them homes.
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Chapter 3: What are the consequences of the Lahaina fire?
We're mad. We're mad. We didn't just lose our homes. We lost our town. We lost history, you know? Our kids are traumatized. You guys messed up real bad.
Who messed up real bad? That is the kind of question that some people make it their business to find out. In my work, failure is fatal. Ed Gallia is director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich in London. He got his PhD in astrophysics.
I was modelling how stars are born and how they die, but it so happens that the mathematics that I use to develop these models of stars are very similar to the mathematics that we need to simulate how fire spreads in structures.
Gallia studies how people react to disasters.
For example, the World Trade Center evacuation in 9-11, the Dusseldorf Airport fire, the Grenfell Tower fire. It's not just fire where a lot of this is relevant. If we look at marauding armed shooters, we also study those situations. The event in South Korea where there were a number of young people crushed to death in a narrow street is another example.
It's always distressing to look at a new event, especially events that were predictable and preventable.
Wait a minute. Events that were predictable and preventable? Like marauding armed shooters? or that crowd crush on Halloween in Seoul, South Korea, where more than 150 young people were killed? Don't events like these happen because they weren't predictable and preventable?
We tend to use the word tragedy to describe all kinds of terrible events, but what do you call a tragedy that was predictable and preventable? You call that a failure. At least Ed Gallia does. Consider the 102 people who died by fire in Lahaina.
One of the key issues in managing wildfire situations is managing the evacuation. When do you start the evacuation? How do you inform the public as to the need to evacuate?
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Chapter 4: How do failures lead to tragedies?
Did you hear any alarms? Did you get any kind of warning? No alarms, no warning, nothing, no sign, nothing that we had to evacuate.
Government investigators found that the fire was caused by a series of failures. A fallen power line was mistakenly re-energized. which ignited a gully full of dry grass that should have been trimmed. And it's clear that the evacuation was a failure, a failure that could have been prevented. As Ed Gallia likes to say, a failure is not just about the tragic moment.
It's a chain of events. Failure to notify people early enough. Failure for the people to respond to the call. Failure for the people to have a plan as to what they're going to do during an evacuation.
OK, can we agree on that, that a failure, any kind of failure, is a chain of events? There can be any number of causes and any number of consequences to embarrassment, shame, anger, pain, financial loss, the loss of reputation, the loss of life. There are public failures and private failures, each of them costly in their own ways.
And of course, there is the fear of failure and the fear of being seen having failed. This means that sometimes we don't even try. And what's the cost of that? Or we try to hide our failures, which means denying everyone else what might have been a helpful example. You might think that as long as we humans have been failing, that by now we would be very good at managing it and learning from it.
But my argument today is that we are not. Most of us don't think about failure as a chain of events. Most of us get angry or frustrated and we go looking for someone to blame. Consider what happens when a hospital patient is given the wrong drug.
The natural tendency is just to look at what they call in hospitals the sharp end, the last person, the person at the bedside who administered that drug. But in fact, the chain of events goes back to the pharmacy and even to the IT folks who printed the label in a weird way.
That is Amy Edmondson, another failure expert. She's at the Harvard Business School, and her research focus is on failure in organizations, which is not uncommon.
Many times you have failures in organizations simply because one silo doesn't know what the other silo is doing. So these are learning events. One big reason we don't learn enough from failures is that we don't share them systematically enough.
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Chapter 5: Why do we struggle to learn from failures?
Well, I actually don't think that they're a failure, but that's for different Darwinian reasons.
There are failures of imagination. You've prepared for problems A, B, C, D, E, and F, and something like M comes out of the blue and smacks you.
Failures of determination. Part of my problem was I did not ask... Enough questions. And failures that cut deep. I think that was my tipping point where I just went, I'm done. And it broke me.
You will hear those stories and you'll also hear about better ways to think about failure and learn from it. I once had a wise teacher and he had a wise teacher and she had a wise teacher and that teacher had a mantra. It went like this. Be bad. Don't be boring. I should say these were acting teachers, but I think the lesson applies anywhere.
The idea is that when you're trying to create something or accomplish something, it's tempting to stick to the boring, the tried and true, the riskless path. That's how much we fear failing. But the point of the mantra is that it's better to take a chance, to risk being bad, because that's the only way you'll actually make something good.
Our special series, How to Succeed at Failing, gets started right now.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
If we could just talk about your path to this moment, this place, how did you become a scholar of failure, if I may be so bold as to call you so?
I'm very happy to be called that. It seems like an upgrade. I became a scholar of failure because I wanted to be a scholar of organizational learning. So I came to graduate school with the idea, unformed, that organizations need to keep changing to stay relevant in a world that keeps changing. And they didn't seem to be very good at it.
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Chapter 6: How does fear of failure affect decision-making?
We're not trained very well in the whole idea of uncertainty or novelty.
You write that there are three reasons why most of us fail at failure. Aversion, confusion, and fear. I'd like you to walk us through each of those and say how they contribute to failure.
Sure. I think of them as emotional, cognitive, and social. So emotionally, we're just spontaneously averse to failure, right? I don't like it. I don't want to have it. I don't want to look at it, right? It's immediate. Cognitively, because we don't do a good job or don't have access to a simple framework to distinguish among kinds of failures, we then sort of decide to not like any of them.
And the fear part has to do with our concerns, very deep and deeply founded concerns of what other people think of us. So we don't want to be seen as having shortcomings. We don't want to be seen as associated with a failure.
Wow. So in other words, in every strand of our lives, right, the social, the internal, we have the capacity to fail. I mean, we're really good at failing, you're saying.
We're good at failing. I mean, we are, by definition, fallible human beings, each and every one of us. And we will have failures. You know, the only real question is, how bad do we have to feel about it?
There have been plenty of efforts to rebrand failure. You can see this by simply scrolling through the titles of popular TED Talks. Smart Failure for a Fast-Changing World. How Failure Cultivates Resilience, The Unexpected Benefit of Celebrating Failure. Embracing failure is a particularly popular idea in Silicon Valley.
Although, interestingly, you never hear about it from people who are in the midst of a failure. You hear about it after the fact from people who have succeeded wildly. Here's Mark Zuckerberg from a commencement speech at Harvard in 2017.
Facebook wasn't the first thing I built. I also built chat systems and games, study tools and music players, and I'm not alone. J.K. Rowling got rejected 12 times before she finally wrote and published Harry Potter. Even Beyonce had to make hundreds of songs to get Halo.
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Chapter 7: What cultural differences exist in perceptions of failure?
And some people, a surprising number of people say, I can't think of any mistakes. But the people I think are the real experts, they can tell you because those mistakes have been bothering them for the last couple of weeks or
But many of the failures that I read about in the academic literature on leadership and management, most of them have a happy ending. We got through all that failure on the way to our great triumph. What do you think of that type of narrative being so dominant? Does it hide too many failures that end in failure?
I think it does. I think the failure stories tend not to be advertised as well. People who had those stories aren't in a position to go on the lecture circuit or write books.
Would the world be better if we had a broader acceptance of or at least less fear of discussing failure?
I think it would, but we don't want to discourage entrepreneurs from trying things out, even though the chances of success are so low. It's not a good gamble for the entrepreneurs, but it's good for our society.
Let's step back for a minute and acknowledge this fact. The way we see failure has changed over the centuries. It also varies greatly across individuals and across cultures. The ancient Greeks, for instance, hated and feared failure, but they largely attributed it to the whims of the gods. The ancient Romans, meanwhile, attributed failure, particularly on the battlefield, to human error.
Failure was considered shameful, often the grounds for suicide. And think about the Christian concept of original sin. You are born with failure in your soul. I asked Gary Klein for a modern definition of failure, at least his modern definition.
Failure is an inability to accomplish important goals that you have set out for yourself.
Okay, that's one definition, maybe a bit narrow. I asked Amy Edmondson for her take.
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Chapter 8: How does love relate to failure?
And so they avoid it, or they just find some ways to redirect the focus of the team in another direction so they don't have to confront how this failed and why it failed.
So when you're in the realm of decision making, you're working with a lot of people, I assume, who come from different disciplines. They might be from management, from engineering and so on. But with a background in cognitive psychology, I'm wondering, Gary, if you feel the way you do about failure in part because of an evolutionary explanation.
In other words, does failure need to burn at us for the simple reason that we won't progress as a tribe, as a civilization, if it doesn't burn at us?
That feels right. I would accept that analysis.
So if someone were to ask you what's the correct way or the most productive way to think about failure generally, do you have an answer for that?
I don't have a good answer. I'll tell you what I do. What I do is... I become discouraged and depressed for a couple of days. And I say, I never want to do any of that again. And I just, I don't totally repress it, but I wish I could repress it.
And then eventually, after a couple of days, almost always, I realized, you know, if I had done that or if we had arranged that differently, that could have been really exciting. And now I can't wait to do it again.
So that's how a couple of psychologists think about failure, especially personal failures and failure in organizations. Let's slide over to thinking about failures in the economy. How might an economist think about failure? I think it's extraordinarily important. John Van Rienen is a professor at the London School of Economics.
He studies innovation, or as Amy Edmondson calls it, innovation blah, blah, blah.
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