"Failure presents invaluable learning and growth opportunities. But to extract such learnings, we need to analyze not only the failed result, but also the failure itself.
Amy Edmundson of the Harvard Business School makes the case that we need to see that failure comes in three basic types – preventable, complex, and intellectual. And she urges us to see that not all failures are equal.
Preventable failures are just what they sound like – failures we have the knowledge and ability and sole power to prevent. When we fail a test we didn’t study for, or let ourselves or a loved one, a friend, or a coworker or even Hashem down on any of a million promises we might have made, it’s reasonable to feel bad about ourselves for this failure we could have prevented.
Complex failures [by contrast,] occur when we have good knowledge about what needs to be done, but a combination of internal and external factors outside our control come together in a way to produce a failure. Here, we have the knowledge, but not sole control. These kinds of failures happen all the time in hospital care, for example, where there’s enough volatility or complexity in the environment that things just happen.
The third, and juiciest form of failure is intellectual failure. This is what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs talk about when they promote “failing fast” or “failing forward.” Often, these types of failures occur when we’re working in areas in which we lack both expertise and control, or when we are trying things we’ve never tried before.
Ultimately, all failure should be contemplated, not ignored. And while feeling bad about ourselves is sometimes warranted, it should never be a permanent state of being."
