Thoughts on Failure
Like you, I have always been drawn to stories of failure as vital to scientific discovery. There is also the mantra in the halls of technology companies to “fail fast and fail often—” an intriguing idea, but how does that actually work on the ground? Not everyone has the privilege of failing or disclosing their failures in our success-driven academic institutions. What are the hazards in failing and failure disclosure in institutions that are failure-avoidant? And for women in STEM, especially Black Indigenous People of Color, who are often called on to prove that we belong, how may we normalize failure as essential to STEM without having our core competency challenged?
Gertrude J. Fraser, Principal Investigator, Anthropologist
I’ve realized that all of my work has been full of things that break and fail; that we don’t understand and they fail; that we just get it wrong the first time, and so they fail. I think about the thousands of people who built the Hubble and how many failures they endured…And none of those failures were a reason for them to give up.
Erika Hamden, Astrophysicist
Failure is embedded in the structures of the academy; failure is an inherent part of academic knowledge production; and failure is an experience that is not equally felt, but is contingent upon uneven power relations and positionalities. We…suggest that the failure of the university sector to cope with this existential threat has exposed the very worst characteristics of market-driven education.
Elly Harrowell, Geographer
Disaster stories can reduce hierarchy, normalize learning through mistakes and build relationships among workers through the sharing of humbling personal struggles. The stories promote collaboration, a sense of belonging and the value of continuous learning for all the community’s members.
Caitlin Wylie, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
…Failure in science is fundamentally different from all the other failures you’ve read about in self-help and business books and articles in Wired and Slate. It is a kind of failure we don’t appreciate enough. Not understanding this, not appreciating failure sufficiently, leads to distorted views of science and denies one a surprisingly useful but rarely considered version of failure… Is it the actual failure that is the end in itself? Or is it the willingness to fail, the expectation of failure, the acceptance of failure, the desirability of failure? Can you imagine making failure desirable? Can you imagine aiming at failure? Can you appreciate making failure your goal?
Stuart Firestein, Biologist
Contemporary research on failure goes beyond establishing whether something is a failure or not, whether failure could have been avoided, or whether failure is an element of social con-struction and subjectivist interpretation. The complexity of the social processes inevitably calls for a genealogical exploration of why something is considered a failure and by whom, and what social dynamics these attributions produce.
Adriana Mica, Sociologist
Neither of my parents ever finished high school, and I encountered numerous failures as I journeyed from rural China to receiving a PhD degree from Cornell University and becoming a Schmidt Science Fellow. Gladys and [We] wrote this piece on our failures in graduate school to empower the next generation of scientists, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds who may lack relatable career stories. We also deeply resonate with the vision of the Schmidt Science Fellows program that encourages scientists to try, fail, make pivots, try again, succeed or fail better…
Elvis Cao, Schmidt Science Fellow, Chemical Engineering
Gladys Ngetich, Schmidt Science Fellow, Kenya