January 30th
Failure Avoidance
“The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.” Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
Did you know that when NASA was searching for the first person to walk on the moon, the filter that became most important to them was finding people who had failed and recovered? I learned this interesting fact while watching a video of a speech by Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University. It’s an interesting video about the kinds of people Pixar is looking to hire, but it’s also instructive, I think, about how educators and parents should view risk taking and failure.
According to Nelson, NASA had an abundance of applicants, almost all of whom had impressive resumes with a lot of depth. It was impossible to filter them into a manageable group. There were just too many people who were successful. What they settled on was looking at people who were not merely successful but people who had also failed and recovered. Recovering from failure requires innovation, and that is what NASA needed. It’s also what Pixar needs, and those are the kinds of jobs that our students will find most interesting when they enter the job market.
I worry about the length to which parents and teachers sometimes go to help children avoid failure. It is almost an axiom in our culture that children should never experience failure. We go to extremes sometimes to protect them from failure and to ensure their success. Of course, any good parent doesn’t want to see his/her child get hurt, but good parents also want their children to experience the joy of taking risks, experiencing setbacks, and finding ways to achieve success in spite of the setbacks. This can happen in almost any setting: academic, social, athletic, artistic.
It’s a balancing act. We don’t want our children to be harmed; we do want them to experience overcoming failure to find success. What I worry about is allowing that teeter-totter to get out of balance, to put too much weight on the avoiding failure end. I see that sometimes when parents come to the rescue of their children when they’ve misbehaved, attempting to place the blame somewhere else. Children eventually pay a big price for that. I see it when parents get too involved in school assignments, resulting in work that is more reflective of the parent’s ability than the child’s. I see it when teachers accept less than a student’s best effort in an assignment, especially when the student ends up getting a good grade on the assignment. I see it when parents or teachers interfere too much in a child’s social life. Dealing with conflict on the playground, for example, is one of the ways in which children figure out social norms. Adults need to step in when there is bullying or fighting involved, but sometimes adults step in too early, depriving the child of the opportunity to learn on his/her own. (Read The Blessing of a Skinned Knee by Wendy Mogel, as well as Best Friends, Worst Enemies by Michael Thompson and Catherine Grace.)
I believe that a healthy school environment provides opportunities for children to take risks, to experience failure, and to find ways to overcome that failure. I see our teachers work this magic daily. One little kindergarten boy was recently distraught over his inability to draw stars. His teacher, Christy Doxsee, allowed him to struggle a bit. She didn’t immediately come to his rescue, but she did provide the right emotional environment and structure for him to eventually become successful. It’s a small example, but it’s symbolic of the right balance. Those small successes when you’re five years old become bigger successes as you grow older if you are allowed to take appropriate risks and to figure out solutions in the face of failure.
Trust and Go Forward,
Raymond Nance
Head Boar