Why talking about failure matters

This is a guest post by Dr Taryn Bell, Researcher Development Advisor for Careers and Fellowships, University of Leeds), Dr Anna Pilz, Research Development Manager, University of Edinburgh, and Dr Johanna Stadlbauer, Head of the Research Careers Campus, University of Graz.

Applied for a grant and been rejected? Applied for an academic job and been unsuccessful? Set up an experiment and it didn’t work?You’re not alone. 

Over the last few years, we’ve become increasingly interested in what it means to fail in academia, and how we can create a more failure-friendly culture in which we can all be open about our ‘unsuccesses’. In this post we consider how failure is experienced in academia, showcase real-world examples of how researchers have learnt from failure and suggest some steps we can take to proactively equip our research communities to tackle and respond to failure and fiascos.

Why does failure hit so hard in academia?

Things don’t always turn out as intended, planned or desired in research (or life).  We shouldn’t expect them to when research thrives on innovation and breaking new ground, where funding and jobs are limited in a highly competitive environment. Failure is a normal part of working in research. Why, then, do we not talk about it more? Why do we hide our failures?

In certain corporate settings, the mantra of ‘fail fast, fail quickly’ infers that failure is a learning experience. Academic failure, however, is often placed in direct opposition to success (Timmermans and Kumar 2023), and treated like a personal failing. This can be further exacerbated by the financial and/or professional consequences of the failure, such as uncertain career prospects or loss of employment. Failure isn’t just about getting things wrong; for precarious early career researchers, it can make or break careers.

So, what steps can we take to ensure that ‘failure isn’t fatal’? Below, we share some real-world examples we’ve collected over the years.

What can researchers and teams do to be more failure-friendly? 

The shared spreadsheet that logs rejections: Everyone who gets rejected for a grant (or anything else you determine party-worthy) logs it into the spreadsheet, and when you hit a certain number, you host a celebration. Or, be inspired by Maynooth’s Geography Department that buys a pot plant for every rejected funding application. Read more: A Toast to All the Rejects: What a shared rejection spreadsheet taught me about success (Cohen 2022).

Show-and-tell: from reviewer comments to published paper: One or two researchers present reviewer comments they got on a paper that was successfully published and explain how a) they were affected by the feedback, and b) how they engaged with the feedback. Credit for this idea goes to a group of participants at the ‘Forum of failures and fiascos’ workshop on Sept 23 at Vitae Conference 2024 in Birmingham, during which ideas were brainstormed and examples collected in a shared pad.

Share food and drink and one thing that went badly for you in the past month: It can be common to share things that have gone well – but what about turning this around and sharing ‘unsuccesses’? Gather a small group of people monthly, share snacks, and go round in a circle to speak briefly about what happened, how you felt at the time, and how you feel now. Compare and contrast what happened to all of you and gather suggestions on handling these setbacks and reflect on them. Read more: University of Oxford’s ‘Overcoming a Sense of Academic Failure workbook’ (Page 18).

What can universities do?

Empowering students to fail well: Warwick University’s Wellbeing and Student Support Services promotes a culture of ‘failing well’ that dives into the symptoms and patterns of how fear of failing might manifest with suggestions for reframing failure. Warwick’s Medical School leads on a project that aims to develop a ‘Safe to Fail Research Culture’.  

Host ‘Failure Salons’ or ‘Festivals’: Host events where established researchers share their failures or, like the University of Graz’s ‘Fiasco Fest’, do this with a professional facilitator.Fiasco Fest is a two-plus hour experience lab, designed to provide a brave space for researchers to share their setbacks and failures. A facilitator provides psychological insights and tools that help with coping, enabling researchers to handle their next Fiasco with care (and maybe even humour). Carried out in Graz since 2022, this is now part of a bigger project spanning Ireland, Poland, France, and Italy, and a facilitation manual is also in the works.  Read more about the Fiasco Fest collaboration. 

Open up the conversation on failure: In 2018, the University of Oxford ran a 5-part podcast series on ‘Overcoming a Sense of Academic Failure’. The conversations tackled feelings of failure and addressed such crucial questions as ‘Why does the idea of leaving academic so often feel like professional failure’? Listen to the conversation: Overcoming a Sense of Academic Failure | University of Oxford Podcasts.The Research Culture Uncovered Podcast has also begun to release episodes on the subject of failure, considering who is allowed to fail, how we learn from failure, and how to help researchers ‘fail better’. Previous posts on the Auditorium have also contributed to the conversation, asking, where do narratives of failure come from? And sharing personal stories of how failure can hold us accountable for supporting others who fail within processes we ourselves have established.

Collaborate on recognising, acknowledging and learning from failure: Fail Space is a collaboration between the University of Leeds and Queen Margaret University that investigated ways in which the cultural sector can learn from failure. Though not directly about the research environment, the project resources – including the FailSpace toolkit – can support HEIs in setting the tone and inviting failure-friendly conversations. Read more: FailSpace – Centre for Cultural Value.

So, how can you personally encourage a more failure-friendly culture?

Here are some suggestions for how you too can remove the stigma of failure and start fruitful discussions.

1. Be open about your own experiences of failure, use meetings as an opportunity to crowdsource solutions or simply provide a space for discussion.
2. Consider including unsuccessful funding applications in promotions / in recruitment / in interviews as these demonstrate your understanding of the funding landscape, strategic approach to realising research ideas and the development of independent research. (Making it onto reserve lists or progressing to the final stages of review processes are indicators of success.)  
3. When you review the work of others, think about how you frame your feedback and how it will land emotionally. Make your  feedback  actionable (see a previous Auditorium post, Feedback That Doesn’t Sting, for more advice on this subject).  
4. Consider messaging / interventions / resources targeted at unsuccessful candidates for  internal schemes that require application – whether for funding, leadership training or internal fellowship schemes, etc.  
5. Provide space to share and think about how you frame and embed failing into training and communications. 
6. When selecting speakers or chairing panel conversations that enable peer learning, prompt reflections on rejections and unsuccess. 
7. Reflect on how you and your institution can make better use of lessons learned from past experiences / processes / interventions. 

Creating more failure-friendly cultures involves a closer look at expectations – those we set for ourselves or that we perceive are in place in our research communities and environments. We can all contribute to a more failure-friendly research culture! 

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to conversations around failure, whether at workshops, online or in conversations with us. In particular to attendees at the 2024 Vitae Conference, as well as Dr Rhoda Stefanatos for her insightful comments on an earlier draft