The Advantage of Falling Short

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena had never failed so spectacularly. In late 1999, two spacecraft sent to explore Mars suddenly vanished when they reached the planet. The first headed to the dark side and disappeared. The second reached its destination in fine shape, but it stopped sending signals as it approached the rocky surface.

The immediate price of the two debacles included the $360 million invested in the missions and a big slice of JPL’s pride. But in the months that followed, the intangible cost, in terms of low morale, seemed to grow ever larger. The leafy JPL campus in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains became even more quiet. The chill also spread through the nation’s small community of deep space explorers, as engineers and scientists were transferred, demoted or left for other jobs. “It was a bleak period,” recalls David Spencer, who was responsible for making a success of the next Mars flight-named Odyssey. A boyish 36-year-old with short blond hair and blue eyes, Spencer has spent much of his adult life in pursuit of the heavens. His career at JPL, where he has specialized in the mechanics of flight, had been marked by one success after another. “We hadn’t had a major failure in decades and here we had them back to back. There were some pretty heated conflicts over what happened, a lot of finger pointing and accusations.”

The Odyssey mission became the focus of the lab’s desperate effort to recover both the public’s trust and, more important, its image as competent and successful. “A failure would have threatened planetary exploration,” he says. He expected added pressure and accepted extra eyes peering over his shoulder. But he had never imagined that his colleagues would become so grimly obsessive.

“The worst was when I went to Denver for a meeting, even though I was very sick. I ran into one of our guys at the airport and he started grilling me right there in the gate area. Then when I fell asleep on the plane, he woke me up and started asking me questions. ‘What if this happens?’ ‘What if that happens?’ I thought he was going off the deep end.”

But in going off the deep end, JPL’s engineers eventually discovered the likely reasons for the two disappearances-the technical causes as well as a dysfunctional work culture that contributed to the errors. Along the way, they also learned a lesson they had not expected. JPL’s shame, recrimination and eventual recovery taught them how people and organizations respond to failure, one of the most valuable and least-talked-about human experiences.

Lately, however, the subject of failure has captured the attention of sociologists, investors, engineers, scientists and sports performance experts. Their purpose is to find clues into why failure occurs and how reactions to it determine future success.

“Everything relates to failure,” says Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University in North Carolina. “We grow up experiencing failure as children and then we go through it as adults. The key is understanding that failure is how we improve. You do this not by ignoring the failure, but by recognizing it, examining it thoroughly and not making any changes until you truly understand it.” Companies, government agencies and even entire professions can learn from failure in the same way, Petroski adds. Civil engineers, for example, have analyzed catastrophes and integrated lessons learned over time into the design and construction of future projects.

WHILE EXPERTS SUCH AS PETROSKI LABOR TO DISSECT THE DYNAMICS OF failure, the rest of us know that human disasters are innately fascinating. “There is a certain staring-at-the-car-wreck aspect to the curiosity people have about failure,” notes Jason Zasky. “And there may be some Schadenfreude, you know, a pleasurable feeling people get over someone else’s disaster. But mostly there’s this realization that some people who have great failures ultimately succeed. It doesn’t always happen. But we see that people fail because they are willing to take risks, and those are the people who often achieve something.”

Zasky should know. In July 2000 he founded an Internet-based magazine called Failure, which publishes articles on debacles as well-known as the Edsel and as obscure as the Jadis, a hybrid tea rose that was a commercial flop because people didn’t like the name. After early struggles, Failuremag.com became one of those rarities in cyberspace: a Web site that didn’t fail, and even became profitable. Its success reflects a certain respect for the subject of failure and, perhaps, a new sophistication about the phenomenon itself.

“I don’t think we’re like Japan, where failure is always a dirty word,” Zasky says. “Here people sometimes see it almost as a matter of pride, that they at least tried. And I think there’s a fascination with how some people fail, but don’t give up, and the next time really succeed.”

This phenomenon, of the failure who resurrects himself in spectacular fashion, was formally documented in 1938. German psychologist Sara Jucknat reported that people who fail at something they deem vital to their identity will often set an even higher goal the next time. Their hope is that they can erase the failure with an impressive success. Along the way they prove to themselves, and perhaps the outside world, that they are, in fact, competent.

Though Jucknat’s seminal study made the dynamics of success and failure a hot topic for a decade or so, interest cooled. It was revived in the 1970s and ‘80s by researchers who preferred to study human strengths rather than pathologies. Martin Seligman is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer in studying how people cope successfully with adversity. His writings on “learned optimism” became classics in this field and inspired dozens of academics to begin looking at the positive qualities that help certain people rise above hard times. They found that those who turn failure into advantage share a handful of characteristics:

They possess the analytical skills to take apart a fiasco and understand it well enough to make changes, says George Vaillant, director of the Study of Adult Development at Harvard Medical School. Vaillant has seen people develop this trait and use it to create successes, even late in life.

They have “the capacity to form meaningful relationships,” Vaillant says. “These people can metabolize others-taking in what they have to teach-rather than being oblivious. These are the ones who find mentors throughout their lives. They have the ability to find meaning in what happens to them.”

They also have the ability to be realistic, rather than undyingly optimistic, in the face of crises. Business management guru James Collins, author of the recent best-selling book “Good to Great,” says this point was brought home vividly during an interview he conducted with a Vietnam War prisoner, a retired naval officer. Realists succeed under the worst conditions, the officer said, while optimists “died of broken hearts.”

AS WITH EVERY ASPECT OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR, GENETICS AND ENVIRONMENT-nature and nurture-play significant roles. Indeed, children seem to develop what psychologist Salvatore Maddi calls “hardiness” at a very early age. Maddi, a professor at UC Irvine, conducted a pioneering study of this trait, following 450 middle managers at Illinois Bell Telephone through the upheaval that came with deregulation of their industry. Many lost their jobs.

“Two-thirds of the sample fell apart,” Maddi says. “There was violence, strokes, suicides, depression. But one-third not only survived, but thrived.” Among those who did well, Maddi found a great many had been raised in more stressful family conditions and had endured more hardships. “They had also been nominated as the ‘hope of the future for the family,’ and they had accepted the role.”

The people who didn’t fare as well were those who had the most stable, even happy, upbringings. “The important part may have been that they were never selected to show competence, and so they didn’t have this belief that they were going to have it when they needed it.” For those people who weren’t blessed with a stressful childhood, however, there is hope. Maddi insists that they can learn hardiness, even later in life. He teaches these skills at a consulting company in Newport Beach called The Hardiness Institute.

In general, Maddi instructs people to assess their failures coolly and accept responsibility where necessary. He then encourages them to identify real action they can take to recover, and to develop relationships with people who can offer support and guidance. Barring some deeper psychological problem, he says, “These skills can be grafted onto a person, and it is not a long, drawn-out process.”

Maddi, Vaillant and others have data to show that people can learn resilience and learn how to overcome personal failure, even very late in life. However, matters are more complicated when failure occurs in a public arena. Athletes are especially subject to this because any time sport anoints a winner, there are always equal, or greater, numbers of losers. It makes sense, then, that much of what is known about the psychological dynamics of public failure comes from those who observe athletes.

David Conroy and his colleagues study performance at the sports psychology laboratory of Pennsylvania State University. One of their recent findings debunks a myth about what is commonly called the “fear of failure.” Many of us believe that fear of failure must be banished before success can be achieved. It turns out that this kind of fear is not as destructive as we might assume. Indeed, while sports gear marketers preach “No Fear” to the masses, a more sophisticated message might be “A Little Fear Is a Good Thing.”

“The truth is, fear of failure can lead you to your best achievements,” Conroy says. “This is especially true of performers-athletes, actors, musicians and so on-whose livelihoods depend solely on their talents.”

Anxiety about an uncertain future can make people focus and try very hard. Fear is only a problem when it grows so big it becomes a distraction. This can happen when you load too much hope onto the outcome of a single game, or even a single season.

“I worked with a high school tennis player who was having problems that we couldn’t quite get to the bottom of,” Conroy says. “We finally realized what it was when he explained that he was desperate to do well in his junior and senior years because he wanted to go to college, but knew his family couldn’t afford it unless he got a scholarship for his tennis. He did all right and got what he wanted, but it was a struggle.”

Conroy’s tennis player illustrates another core truth about failure. The problem isn’t the defeat we might suffer, but rather, its consequences. “Failure itself is meaningless, but if we believe that failure means we’ll be denied something very important, like an education, then it takes on more meaning.”

Resilient tennis players, for example, understand that every tournament is a “failure” for every player except the champion. So they judge their performances more broadly, looking at how well they played each match, how much effort they expended and whether certain aspects of their game- serve, backhand, net play and so on-showed improvement. Any player who defines every performance that falls short of the championship as a failure puts a destructive level of pressure on themselves. Worse off are those who take the next step and allow failure to determine their entire sense of self. This is when a loss in some competition turns an athlete into a loser in life.

“In sports, people often learn from parents, coaches and siblings that affection and attention are based on success,” Conroy says. Even parents who emphasize effort over results may inadvertently communicate a different set of values when victories are always followed by trips to the ice cream parlor and defeats mean going straight home.

As a practical matter, Conroy suggests that parents dole out treats in a way that breaks the relationship between winning and rewards. “Grab an ice cream when you lose sometimes, and pass it by sometimes after you win.”

Conroy argues that failure is so much a part of life that it should be considered normal in a life well-lived. The hordes of unemployed high-tech workers seem to share this idea. Pink slip parties and Internet-based communities for the suddenly dismissed have eased the shame in these industries by bringing failure out of the closet.

Carlotta Stankiewicz of San Antonio responded to losing her job at an ad agency by starting a Web site called Planetpinkslip.com. Serving a group she calls “income challenged” was not the best strategy for making money, but as she connected with an ever-wider number of refugees from failed companies, she began to see that her being among those chosen for downsizing was a failure that didn’t define her.

“I had been a straight-A student, president of my high school class, and I had gotten every job I ever applied for,” says Stankiewicz, 37. “I valued achievement, success very much, and I had very little experience with failure.” When she lost access to the praise and attention she received on the job, Stankiewicz was forced to find rewards elsewhere. She discovered them in her home life, in her Web site and in her new work as a freelance writer. So far, she says, no prospective clients have been discouraged by her job loss.

“It’s almost a cool thing, in certain industries, to have been part of a failed company or a downsizing,” Stankiewicz says. “It’s a sign that you were willing to take a risk in the first place. People respect that you were brave enough to try.”

Even lenders and government agencies extend respect to once-failed entrepreneurs who come back with a new idea. Matt Bergheiser, who recruits businesses for the city of Trenton, N.J., says that failure no longer leaves an indelible mark of defeat. “Failure has become recognized as part of the normal cycle, especially for small business,” says Bergheiser, who arranges financing and subsidizes real estate for start-ups. What’s important is whether an entrepreneur has learned from failure. “If they see how they could do it better, that’s a good sign. But if they just blame others, or the economy, then they haven’t benefited from the failure they experienced.”

Even so, the benefits of failure are not recognized as an asset in every business in every part of the country. In high-tech regions on the two coasts, it’s relatively easy to rebound from a major defeat. Yet in more traditional businesses and less entrepreneurial environments, the taint of a bankruptcy, or firing, can be more poisonous to the future. Certain individuals may also feel the shame of failure more keenly. Bergheiser recalls a businessman in Philadelphia as an example of the paralyzing shame that many people feel after a big flop.

“This guy’s company went out of business, but he didn’t tell anyone in his family. Every day he got up, got dressed and left like he was going to work. Instead he just sort of wandered around. This went on for months before he was finally honest with them. When he was, they accepted it. They still loved him.”

A recent entry in the annals of failure research points to a pesky and subtle kind of defeat that can darken our mood and undermine progress without our ever knowing. It’s subconscious failure.

In a series of experiments, psychologist Tanya Chartrand has found that most of us harbor subconscious hopes and aspirations, and that we feel bad when we don’t realize them. “You can have a general, non-conscious goal of pleasing every person you come in contact with,” she says. “As you go through life, you are going to succeed at that and fail with different people. The failures are understood at a level we aren’t aware of, but they affect us.”

Chartrand, a professor at Ohio State University, found that student subjects felt their mood darken when they were thwarted in the pursuit of some unconscious need. In one experiment she also discovered that failure to achieve an unconscious goal suppressed student performance in a test involving verbal skills. Students who were unsuccessful in achieving an unconscious goal in the first test did worse on the second test.

Beyond such immediate effects, Chartrand suspects that we can suffer repeated, even chronic, failure if we are blocked by unconscious needs that are no longer useful. A good example of this is the person who is promoted to a management position but continues to unconsciously seek friendship and approval from everyone on the job.

ALTHOUGH INDIVIDUALS MAY RELY ON FRIENDS AND FAMILY TO RECOVER from defeat, some losses are harder to get over than others. Huge public debacles can cause severe feelings of shame and guilt, especially if great sums of money are lost or people die. In the rather close-knit community of bridge builders, for example, it is generally accepted that designers and engineers may suffer unexpected illness, even death, if one of their creations collapses-as occurred after two of the biggest bridge failures ever recorded: the Tacoma Narrows collapse of 1940 and the St. Lawrence River collapse of 1907.

Despite the enormous damage, Petroski points out that failures of massive engineering projects have provided critical lessons in the development of safer technologies. After the Tacoma Narrows bridge fell, engineers began to consider aerodynamics in their designs, to accommodate the wind pressures that caused the collapse. In the case of the 1907 Quebec disaster, a postmortem discovered that the method used, which pushed the limits of design for cantilever bridges, had produced weak members that couldn’t hold up the load they were supposed to bear. The design was abandoned.

As another practical example of improvement via failure, Petroski points to the Challenger disaster of 1986, which killed seven astronauts when the shuttle’s giant launch rocket exploded in the stratosphere. The cause was a joint with a rubber seal ring that had contracted due to unusually cold weather. “The first solution could have been redesigning the joint,” Petroski notes. “But that redesign could have produced new, unexpected problems. It was more sensible to simply say, ‘We won’t launch when it’s that cold.’ ”

In altering the launch-decision process, rather than the technology, NASA came close to confirming the conclusions of sociologist Diane Vaughan. For her book, “The Challenger Launch Decision,” Vaughan reviewed statements by everyone involved in the debate over whether to proceed despite the cold that morning. She reached the startling conclusion that it was not risk-taking that led to failure, but conformity. In fact, given the ethos that existed at NASA, the truly risky move that morning would have been to scrub the launch. In a sense, a momentary failure-a suspended launch-was avoided, with catastrophic results.

“The shuttle was experimental, and problems were considered a normal part of things,” Vaughan says. “The overall guideline was: Everything is risky. We eliminate the risks we can and contain the ones we can’t. When you can’t eliminate a risk, you calculate your margin of safety and go ahead if it seems acceptable.”

Unfortunately, little hard data was available about the rocket’s performance in cold weather. At the same time, NASA was under pressure to conduct as many shuttle missions as possible, in part because commercial payloads were covering the cost. Add the enormous public attention created by the addition of an elementary school teacher to the crew, and the agency felt a tremendous impetus to proceed. “There were some concerns about the decision that couldn’t be supported by data,” Vaughan adds. “But intuition didn’t carry much weight at all in that situation.”

The repercussions from the Challenger failure went beyond the loss of life and the damage to NASA’s reputation. The institution benefited from the investigations that followed. Among other changes, engineers were given more power to stop a launch for safety’s sake.

But as so often happens within large organizations struck by big public failures, many individuals suffered personally and did not get a shot at real redemption. As the post-Challenger investigations pressed forward, those who had been in the launch-control chain of command were scrutinized, if not made into scapegoats. “People were punished,” Vaughan says. “They were pushed aside, sent for re-education. Lives were ruined. Unfortunately, that’s pretty typical with a failure this big in a system this big. People pay a personal price.”

Although individuals and organizations generally react to failure in similar ways, the firings and transfers of employees after Challenger reveal a major difference. Individuals can forgive themselves, learn from the mistakes and try again. But large organizations often have trouble forgiving those responsible. It’s as if the only way for them to heal and move ahead is to first purge some employees, whether they are truly responsible or are simply convenient targets. In the best cases, Vaughan adds, leaders will also examine what might have gone wrong with the organization as a whole, and its systems, but this doesn’t always happen.

WHEN JPL LOST ITS TWO MARS spacecraft, it and NASA conducted sweeping investigations. In the case of the orbiter, the investigators discovered that engineers had failed to convert English measures into metric. This error sent the orbiter too close to the planet, where the friction of the atmosphere burned it up. The error was compounded, adds engineer David Spencer, by a JPL culture that dismissed the intuition of some veterans who had expressed concerns about the orbiter’s trajectory. When the data didn’t support those early warnings, the younger scientists who ran the project dismissed them.

The analysis of the second loss, that of the Mars Polar Lander, concluded that the failure occurred on its descent to the surface. As planned, the lander’s legs deployed at an altitude of 1.5 kilometers. But vibrations from the deployment apparently mimicked the shock of landing and triggered a sensor on the footpad that shut down the craft’s engine. With no thrust to slow it down, the lander crashed.

Engineers had not programmed the lander to account for the vibrations, Spencer says. “For the future we would have to augment the design and we would have to accept a Red Team [of other experts] to oversee our mission. They punched holes in everything we did. It was not a pleasant experience.”

It was far more pleasant, however, than the experiences of those who were most involved in the failures of the lander and orbiter. Though failure may have gained new respect in recent years, huge, politically based bureaucracies that run on tax dollars still have trouble tolerating big errors. “There was a mass exodus from Lockheed Martin,” a key JPL contractor, Spencer recalls. “But I’m not sure that’s all for the best.” The departures “meant a great drain of experience and manpower. I think that an engineer-a person, really-who has failed is worth much more, because of what is learned from the experience, than one who has never failed.”

Although the technical discoveries were valuable, Spencer came to believe that the intellectual autopsies done on the two failed missions yielded more important information about the culture at JPL. For instance, he says, he was impressed during the reviews by the abilities of the “graybeards” at JPL to use the backs of envelopes to figure things out. Younger scientists who have always relied on computers don’t have those instincts.

Excessive budget pressures and a failure to follow procedures also were major culprits. “The team did not follow procedures when it came to reporting problems, and never properly documented it for the project managers. If they had, it would have been assigned to a team and it would have been solved.”

With the Mars Odyssey, NASA abandoned its mantra of “faster, cheaper,” and fully funded the mission, allocating nearly $300 million for the project, almost as much as was spent to launch its two previous spacecraft. “We also went back to the basics of reporting and following procedures very closely,” Spencer adds.

Odyssey was launched in April 2001, reached the Red Planet in October and recently began sending back data on the composition of its surface and on radiation in its environment. “The team pulled together and restored some of the rigor to the program,” Spencer says. So far, Odyssey is an unqualified scientific success. It has also become a textbook example of a highly public failure and its profound effects on individuals and institutions.

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Michael D’Antonio is a New York writer who last wrote for the magazine about genetic engineering of mosquitoes. He is co-author of “Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe” (Hyperion).