This Moment: The Blog - Jessica C. McWade, Ed.D.

It’s called the scientific method. Discovery results in creating hypotheses, testing them experimentally, failing, learning, and repeating the process wiser for the failure. Yes, getting something wrong is often a predicate for getting it right. In this sense, failure is a cornerstone of science and prelude to discovery. Nobody wants failure in daily organizational life, of course. Nonetheless, it is inevitable. It all comes down to how you deal with failure in the moment and whether you use it to learn and apply its lessons. Failure can deliver useful lessons as long as people don’t sweep it under the rug or play the blame game by attacking and thereby silencing the parties deemed to have failed. The terrific FT Weekend columnist Janan Ganesh recently wrote that, “There are such things as great wrong ideas,” failures that prove to be useful and lead to better outcomes. He points to Freud whose work has been discredited, revised, or abandoned in recent decades – or at least some of it...