I’ve come across several interesting pieces that involve the concept of failure. Failure is praised as being the key to success. It is glamorized and made an essential ingredient in would-be innovative corporate cultures. When you scratch beneath the surface though, failure is often superficially represented. Failing well takes process and effort.

10,000 Hours
Malcolm Gladwell builds a strong case in Outliers that one of the things outstanding individuals in their field have in common is a lot of practice. Specifically, they accrue 10,000 hours early on in life. His point is that standout successes are less about talent than time-in (and the circumstances that allow for that level of commitment). That 10,000 hours is tied directly to failure because in those 10,000 hours there is a lot of failing going on. To make use of failure then, takes a lot of effort. If you work at something hard for 6 hours a day you get just over 2000 hours in in a year. That’s five years of extremely focused work time just to reach that minimum 10,000 hours. Given our fragmented days none of us gets in 6 focused hours. Are we setting enough time aside to accumulate enough failure to succeed?

The neuroscience of ‘gut’intuition.
Jonah Lehrer’s book How We Decide tackles failure from another angle, decision making. He spends a good deal of time demonstrating how experts in their fields – and these are often life or death fields like firefighting and aviation – have trained and practiced so much that they’re able to sense – often without consciously knowing why – what the right decision is. This gut instinct often saves their lives. It also is directly connected to Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. That intense training time – and the inevitable mistakes made during it – is necessary to develop a useful gut instinct.

The Path of Mastery
George Leonard’s book Mastery tackles failure from yet a third perspective, that of the plateau. Rather than getting something wrong, many people in developing their skills hit periods where they simply don’t get any better. This plateau is familiar to anyone who practices sports, music, arts, etc. Those plateaus are part of the 10,000 hours commitment to an endeavor. Sticking to something even when you’re not getting noticeably better at it takes a degree of resolve. These plateaus are also periods of learning but this knowledge is accrued more subtly and often through repetition. This is akin to riding a bicycle. You may not get faster, or more successful with stunts, but every slippery road you navigate or rock you hop adds to that intuitive ability to ‘feel’your way through. It may feel like more of the same on the surface, but underneath deeper learning is happening.

For all three authors success is a product of a commitment of energy, focus and time. It can’t be rushed. But it also can’t be squandered.

Taking Scientific Method out of the laboratory
“Work smarter not harder” is a popular cliche for the benefits of efficiency. I might recast it in terms of learning from failure. While it is popular to have a corporate culture that rewards people willing to fail, without a process to fail well, resources, money and energy can be squandered. Compounding this is the reality of the modern world. Businesses thrive on ‘first-mover advantage’and ‘speed to market’. This creates an environment of pressure to rush things forward.  In doing so, sometimes we mistakenly embrace flailure instead of failure.

Flailure (which is my own word) is experimentation without process. It is a shotgun approach to solving problems. Try this, try that, oh, and try that too. Flailure often happens with the same energy and commitment but with no useful results. Any time a project succeeds or fails and no one knows exactly why, that is a flailure and its a tremendous waste.

We were all taught scientific method in high school. Yet for some reason it rarely finds its way outside laboratories. To make the most of those 10,000 hours of practice time we need to use scientific process. Any project – marketing, financial, operational – can be thought of as an experiment. Doing so means determining what the objective is, developing a hypothesis on how do to it, designing an experiment to test the hypothesis, controlling for interference which might obstruct evaluation of the tested factors and then recording the data properly to conclude what the smartest next step forward will be. This doesn’t require a lab coat or PhD, just a little foresight and thought upfront, before resources are spent.

There is an army adage popularized by General Omar Bradley “Amateurs study strategy, professionals study logistics.” The smartest strategy in the world is only a useful as its execution. If failure is an inevitable part of the strategy for success, shouldn’t we be focused on setting ourselves up to fail usefully? The alternative is crossing our fingers hoping something will work and if it doesn’t having to start at the beginning all over again.

Bringing the scientific process to our vocation begins with paying careful attention to the ‘devil in the details’. The big idea is an adrenaline rush for sure, but its ultimate usefulness – whether that idea succeeds or fails – lies a reasoned approach to the small steps taken toward realizing that idea.