When new employees join at Upside Learning, I tell them – “Making mistakes is ok because you learn from them and that’s the real value of a mistake as it gets you ready for success. So go ahead, work with a free mind, give your best, and everything else would be fine”. Note that it’s not a license to make mistakes it is the freedom to try your best and be ok when you make mistakes. I also tell them “while committing mistakes is ok, repeating them is not, as then the mistake is really costly – to them and to the company, as we did not get anything (hoping for some learning there) out of it”
To me experience is the best teacher and you learn immensely from your failures/mistakes. Last week I read this article on Science Daily that challenges this popular perception. It suggests we learn more from successes than failures and states:
In the July 30 issue of the journal Neuron, Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience, and MIT colleagues Mark Histed and Anitha Pasupathy have created for the first time a unique snapshot of the learning process that shows how single cells change their responses in real time as a result of information about what is the right action and what is the wrong one.
“We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not,” Miller said. Furthermore, when a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain — nor was there any improvement in behavior.
The study sheds light on the neural mechanisms linking environmental feedback to neural plasticity — the brain’s ability to change in response to experience. It has implications for understanding how we learn, and understanding and treating learning disorders.
Somehow that does not sound quite right to me. I am not saying you don’t learn from your successes, I just think you learn MORE from your failures. Not automatically though! The problem I see with this notion of learning-from-successes is that you could have hit upon the right path by chance. While achieve success, you don’t really get to know of wrong paths (and there could be many of them) so there is every possibility you miss the right path when you try the same thing next time. However, when you fail, you analyze & understand the reasons, and then choose the right path. And that sticks with you – resulting in learning.
I think I personally learn MORE from failures than from successes. How about you?
September 18th, 2009 at 11:14 am
Really interesting post, Amit. I think there is no straightforward answer to your question.
A series of failures is bound to demotivate me and a series of success may bore me. I think it is a combination of failures and success that get me going. I learn from my failures to succeed the next time. I learn from my success because I get a positive feeling of achieved something. I learn from my failure because of a negative feeling of losing out on something.
But, like you say, I disagree that failure has no effect on individuals (or even animals for that matter). It definitely has an impact. People also react differently to failure. They may shy away completely or try again to ensure they succeed. It depends on the impact of the failure. If it causes a lot of pain, I may think it is not worth succeeding.
Regards,
Archana
September 18th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
With due respect, I think the argument in a non-scientific sense is just an exercise in corporate political correctness. No organization rewards failure (which is different from experimentation), so the concept of asking employees to fail so they can learn is all pretense. Am not saying failure doesn’t teach though. Success teaches what to do and failure, what to avoid.
September 18th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
I think the nature of the mistake makes a big difference. The quote you included did not mention whether the researchers were looking at a physical or mental task or whether skills or knowledge were involved.
Here’s what I mean: I doubt that making a typing error makes me a better speller or typist, I already know the correct spelling and actions. However, if I forget to step in an important process, I’m more likely to make sure that step is completed next time.
Here’s another example from back in college, if I make an error in my Calculus class, I don’t learn anything until, 1 – I realize that an error was made and 2 – I attempt the problem again and achieve the correct answer.
September 18th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Archana,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I agree you learn both from failures & successes. Positive reinforcement does help in forming desired behavior. Question is what do you learn MORE from? I too learn from my successes. Just that I also think I learn more from my failures.
Regards,
September 18th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Geetha, Thanks for your comments.
When I tell new employees “it’s ok to fail” – it’s like presenting an environment that allows you to fail and learn from your mistakes. I think it helps employees work with a free mind and lets them try out new things.
I agree – no organization rewards failure. Though there are some which celebrate it – and that’s just another way of extracting the best value you can, from failures that happen. I think all organizations realize that failure is part of the job. Whenever an organization tries to innovate, launches new products & services, or implements new processes. IMHO, it makes great sense to create an environment that allows (not rewards) people to fail and learn.
September 18th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
I blogged about the same sciencedaily piece here:
(http://usablelearning.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/do-we-learn-from-failure-or-how-monkey-are-you/)
but basically, the article is generalizing from a study about how monkeys learn, which may be closer to the way children learn (also sciencedaily http://bit.ly/gEca6), rather than human adults.
Essentially, the research, while interesting, doesn’t really contradict the commonly held belief that that people learn a LOT from mistakes and failure (something I firmly believe myself).
September 19th, 2009 at 5:57 am
Amit, early success, rewards and adulation are effective in the short run and are great short-term motivators. This is why you would find repeated successes coming in quick succession. Most fizzle out sooner or later. Success after bouts of failure is more lasting and makes the person grounded. There are plenty of examples of this around us, right from corporate start ups who didn’t seem to start at all, to Khatron ke Khiladi.
But yes, as Archana says, finally success is important in order for “failure” to become a great teacher.
September 21st, 2009 at 9:19 am
I don’t think organizations and managers do a good job at learning from successes. And I am as guilty as anyone else of this. The whole management review governance structures are built around learning from mistakes and ignoring successes. We have goals and measure progress against these. If our goals are consistently being met, there’s hardly any time spent on reviews. However if the goals aren’t met, or a perhaps a project has gone bad, we spend inordinate amount of time doing root cause analysis and identifying corrective actions. Of course root cause analysis and identify corrective actions are absolutely required and we really can’t afford not to do these. We do need to prevent problems from recurring and look for ways to continuously improve the process. However we hardly spend any time in learning what we might be doing right when goals are met, or from projects that went well.
We celebrate successes but don’t necessarily attempt to learn from them formally as much as we attempt to learn from mistakes. Our former Creative Director would go sore screaming at managers, including me, (not literally, don’t get me wrong now) on why we weren’t looking at the 9 projects that went well instead of trying to find out why 1 project went bad.
Why don’t we learn from successes? Could it because it is harder to learn from successes? Or perhaps successes are expected from each of us and we are just doing our job when we succeed. And if we are already doing our job well, what’s to learn?
September 21st, 2009 at 11:03 am
Amit, I’m responding after reading your post and Manish’s. I think you both raise very valid points. The thing is I also believe that brainstorming about learning from successes will lead some where for certain. The thing is we all know and belive about learning from failure as its a proven fact.
I think the point about learning from success is more about continuously improving and reaching a a stage of stability. The more you succeed in a given domain, you move towards specialization, improving your efficieny and perfecting a craft. I think measuring success and learning from it is more in that direction. As I mentioned on Manish’s post, it is worth a discussion.
Will be glad to hear your thoughts! Thanks for sharing…
Sreya
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:23 am
JenN,
Here’s more about the research done (from the Science Daily article):
Monkeys were given the task of looking at two alternating images on a computer screen. For one picture, the animal was rewarded when it shifted its gaze to the right; for another picture it was supposed to look left. The monkeys used trial and error to figure out which images cued which movements.
The researchers found that whether the animals’ answers were right or wrong, signals within certain parts of their brains “resonated” with the repercussions of their answers for several seconds. The neural activity following a correct answer and a reward helped the monkeys do better on the trial that popped up a few seconds later.
“If the monkey just got a correct answer, a signal lingered in its brain that said, ‘You did the right thing.’ Right after a correct answer, neurons processed information more sharply and effectively, and the monkey was more likely to get the next answer correct as well,” Miller said, “But after an error there was no improvement. In other words, only after successes, not failures, did brain processing and the monkeys’ behavior improve.”
Both the points you make are valid. I too tend to remember more when I miss a step of an important process, and ensure that it is not missed next time. The process of learning from mistakes would certainly need – realization that a mistake has been made; and make efforts to resolve the mistake next time. This is exactly what I mean above when I say the learning may not happen automatically (from mistakes). Thanks for your inputs.
September 22nd, 2009 at 5:41 am
Julie,
Thanks for guiding to your insightful post. I agree that this research may apply more to how children learn rather than how adults do.
My main contention with the Science Daily article is actually with the title itself – “Why We Learn More From Our Successes Than Our Failures”. I do learn from my successes, but may be a tad more from my failures. Or is it, I wonder, that what I learn from my successes is from the subconscious while the learning from failures is from conscious effort made to analyze the mistake and complete the task/process successfully (as JenN mentioned above)? And that probably makes learning from mistakes more ‘memorable’.
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:48 am
Manish and Shreya bring up a great point to this discussion.
I agree as organizations we are focused on learning from mistakes. And even though we celebrate success, we don’t really learn much from it. Celebrating success makes heroes out of the people/team involved in achieving the said success, motivates the team (and other teams too) to perform better in future, and hopefully that helps them trying harder for success by not make many mistakes. Unfortunately, celebrating success does not guarantee learning as, I think, there is no conscious attempt to achieve that. However, I do believe that individuals do pick up (in other words ‘learn’) best practices while attempting to achieve success. This is purely an individual activity/initiative and the organization has NO role in this. What organization can (and most try to) do well is to evaluate individual progress on KRAs, apart from celebrating team success.
Learning from success can (and should) be formalized in organizations. Brainstorming (as Shreya mentions) could be one good method. May be we could create Learning Documents after every project is completed & signed-off. The key there is to focus on both what went well and what didn’t. Bringing conscious focus to learn from a project could well do the trick.