Everyone makes mistakes. How do we learn from them? Lessons from the classroom, the Air Force, and the world’s deadliest infectious disease. SOURCES:Will Coleman, founder and C.E.O. of Alto.Amy Edmondson, professor of leadership management at Harvard Business School.Babak Javid, physician-scientist and associate director of the University of California, San Francisco Center for Tuberculosis.Gary Klein, cognitive psychologist and pioneer in the field of naturalistic decision making.Theresa MacPhail, medical anthropologist and associate professor of science & technology studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology.Roy Shalem, lecturer at Tel Aviv University.Samuel West, curator and founder of The Museum of Failure. RESOURCES:"A Golf Club Urinal, Colgate Lasagna and the Bitter Fight Over the Museum of Failure," by Zusha Elinson (Wall Street Journal, 2025).Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, by Amy Edmondson (2023).“You Think Failure Is Hard? So Is Learning From It,” by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2022).“The Market for R&D Failures,” by Manuel Trajtenberg and Roy Shalem (SSRN, 2010).“Performing a Project Premortem,” by Gary Klein (Harvard Business Review, 2007). EXTRAS:"The Deadliest Disease in Human History," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2025).“How to Succeed at Failing,” series by Freakonomics Radio (2023).“Moncef Slaoui: ‘It’s Unfortunate That It Takes a Crisis for This to Happen,'” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2020).
Chapter 1: What is the deadliest infectious disease and why is it overlooked?
Actually, TB, for the last 20, 30 years, has been the number one infectious disease killer in the world. Babak Javid is a physician scientist who studies tuberculosis, or TB.
You may think of TB as a 19th century disease when it was called consumption. It killed John Keats, Anton Chekhov, and at least two of the Bronte sisters. It killed the heroines of both La Boheme and La Traviata. And today, it still kills more than a million people each year, most of them in the developing world.
Chapter 2: How does tuberculosis relate to poverty?
TB is a disease of poverty It's really a major problem in India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, Nigeria TB is a bacterial infection There is a vaccine for it, but it's not always effective
It can be treated with antibiotics, but it's a long and fairly complicated course of treatment. And as deadly as TB is, it doesn't draw the attention or the funding that flow to other diseases.
There is no Hollywood star that gets TB that puts it in the public mind and everyday people's thoughts. One of the reasons I was attracted to this field is I felt that infectious diseases in general, and TB in particular, is... you know, one of the mechanisms of injustice in our world. And I really wanted to tackle that.
Javed runs a tuberculosis research lab at the University of California, San Francisco. He has also worked at labs in Beijing and at Harvard. His kind of research comes with a lot of failure.
I remember in my graduate school, I went over a year and a half without a single experiment working. And it's very hard to get up in the morning and go back and expect to fail again.
The first drug that was found to successfully fight TB is called streptomycin. It was discovered in 1943. It won a Nobel Prize for Selman Waxman, the main scientist behind it.
And the way that streptomycin works is that it does two things. It inhibits the process of making new proteins. It's called a protein synthesis inhibitor. But that in itself doesn't kill the bug. What kills the bug is that in addition to that inhibitory action, it actually causes the bug to make mistakes when it makes these proteins.
What interested Javid was this second function, the drug causing the bacteria to make mistakes as they are creating the proteins that produce the symptoms of TB. So he went looking for other ways to trigger those mistakes, and he found some, but it turned out this wasn't enough to...
to thwart the bacteria. What was really shocking and surprising to me is the bug didn't seem to mind. It just carried on regardless. So I cranked up the error rate and I kept pushing and pushing and really the bugs were kind of fine with it until eventually when I had really cranked up the error rate an awful lot, then the bugs died. It takes a lot of error to kill these bugs.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of adaptive mistranslation in bacteria?
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
Gary Klein is a cognitive psychologist who advises organizations on how to respond to failure. His latest research is around what are called wicked problems.
A wicked problem is one where there's not a clear right answer that people would generally agree upon.
And what share of problems in the world are wicked problems?
Most of the major social problems we wrestle with are wicked problems. We have multiple stakeholders and there's no way to please all of them. And so there's all of this potential conflict and resource situations change or pandemics arise, wars arise, things that are unexpected that are going to upset what you're doing.
In any of those conflicts that Klein is describing, any of those disruptions, let's call them, we suddenly crash into a complex situation that's also fogged in by uncertainty. And now we have to essentially guess what's going to happen next. And those guesses often turn out to be wrong.
I actually went on Anderson Cooper during the early days of the pandemic to tell everyone how wrong I was.
That is Teresa McPhail. She is a medical anthropologist at the Stevens Institute of Technology, one of the country's top engineering colleges. And yes, McPhail is an appropriate name for a professor discussing her own failure in a series about failure. But just wait, it will get even more appropriate later in this episode.
Anyway, McPhail had studied the outbreak of the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009, so her expertise was in demand when COVID came along.
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Chapter 4: How can a premortem improve decision-making?
So interesting. I mean, we always hear about how humans perform poorly under uncertainty generally. So you're saying you're just removing the uncertainty of whether it will work. You're saying it didn't. Now tell me why it didn't. And that provides clarity. Right. So what happens next after people voice these ideas? What happens now?
OK, so let me get we never thought about this as a tool outside our company. This was just something we did. But then we had a big project we were doing for the Air Force. It was a software tool for identifying ways of using precision-guided munitions. And I told my prime sponsor, I want to do a premortem. And he said, what's that? And I explained it to him, and he said, absolutely no way.
Chapter 5: What lessons did Theresa MacPhail learn from the COVID pandemic?
We want everybody to be positive. This is such a depressing exercise. I don't want to do it. And I said... This is an important project. We want it to succeed. This is a way to make it succeed. And reluctantly, he agreed to do it. We were doing this premortem, and there was this young captain. He hadn't said a word. The meeting had gone on for about two days. He hadn't said a word.
And it was time for him to come up with what he had on his list. We'd go around one at a time around the room, and we'd do one or two or three sweeps. And he looked a little nervous, and he said, this tool that we're building, it's for people in the field, and they have these low-powered laptops. The tool we're building runs on a supercomputer that takes 48 hours.
I don't see how that's going to work. And there was silence in the room because everybody realized he was right. And then somebody said, now, I've got a back of the envelope technique that I use that could be a shortcut. And all of a sudden, we were back in business. But if we hadn't done that, we would have failed. And he never would have said that if we didn't give him that space.
And you're saying the person who spoke up was the most junior or among the most junior in the room? Yes, he was. So I've seen this myself many times, not in a premortem, but just in a meeting generally, where junior people, they have very little incentive to speak up. It seems like there's more downside than upside.
It strikes me that American meeting culture is dominated by noisy people who have a lot of confidence, which is often unearned. And I'm curious if you have any advice for having better ideas come through in meetings. Yeah.
I have a couple of ideas, but one of them is the premortem, because the premortem creates a culture of candor. People learn that they can voice unpopular ideas and not be punished for it. It also creates an environment where...
I'm surprised at the ideas that you come up with or this young captain comes up with because a premortem really harvests the different experience and ability of the people in the room. I don't know what's in your head, so how can I appreciate your perspective? But in a premortem, I realize, wow, I never thought of it that way.
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Chapter 6: How does the Museum of Failure help us learn from mistakes?
So there's a chance for the people in the room to start to gain more respect for their colleagues.
I would think that anonymity would be a useful tool here. Why do you not use that?
Anonymity could be useful in environments that are usually very punitive, but in terms of creating a culture of candor, it works better if we're all face-to-face.
Does it sometimes get personal, even ugly?
I have never seen that happen, surprisingly enough, no. No, because everybody knows that this is a made-up failure. So it's not life or death, although it could be. And everybody knows that the intent is to improve the plan.
Can you talk about how to encourage candid feedback generally? Again, it may be the more junior employees, but whoever it is that might have a valuable insight, how can you best float that insight up to leadership?
I've wrestled with that issue for a while because most organizations say that they want insights, but they don't because insights are going to mean that we have to change. And if I'm a mid-level manager, now I've got to change my supply lines, I've got to change my staffing. Can we just continue what we're doing and try to do it better?
They'll say, we want to be harmonious, so we're going to make decisions where everybody agrees. A harmonious decision is a terrible idea because that means that everybody has a veto. And so your chance of coming up with an innovation has been severely compromised.
Do you ever have harmonious decisions in your personal life, maybe with your family?
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Chapter 7: What challenges do startups face in the rideshare market?
Chapter 8: How can organizations encourage candid feedback?
We went back to Will Coleman to ask what he thinks of Gary Klein's suggestion.
Yeah, we're not going to be running any premortems at all. Because why? I guess I disagree with Gary. I mean, if you're constantly focused on the downside, then I think you're probably not focused enough on the upside. I often tell my team, you know, the money-making machine hasn't been built yet.
If you're in a company like Google or Apple or Amazon, the money-making machine has been built and you're just there to make it better. Here, you're really building something from scratch. Honestly, the proposition of failure is almost... Startups fail every day, probably 99% of them. You're already going into this with an understanding that Failure is the most likely outcome.
So we could sit around and talk about that for hours, days, but we'll never make any progress. It's paralyzing. Instead, what we talk about and what I focus on is, you know, how do we just get to the next decision point? How do we just get to tomorrow? How do we just make this incrementally better now?
I hate to keep leading you down the road of potential failure, but I do want to ask, let's say this doesn't work and a couple of years from now, you need to close up shop. Can you envision what that would feel like for you?
It would be devastating. Yeah, I mean, because we've been on the brink of that before. In COVID, I mean, I'm not kidding. We lost 95% of our revenue in a day. We were more agile during that period of time than we had ever been.
And the impact of that was that many of those products that we built that were the ones that succeeded, which was maybe a 10th of them, but the ones that did are now 20, 30% of our revenue. Incremental things that we didn't have before the pandemic have made our business more robust, more resilient.
A couple of months after we spoke with Coleman, we learned that Alto shut down service in San Francisco. Later, they stopped operations in two more cities. This all came with significant layoffs. Does this mean they will join the 90-some percent of failed startups that Coleman mentioned? I, of course, have no way of knowing.
But if they do fail and fail spectacularly, they might end up with this man.
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