Failure isn't just an option

It's probably the most likely outcome, and maybe that's not as bad as you thought it was going to be.

That isn't meant to be a depressing thought. If it's taken that way, it might mean you've been listening to too many motivational speakers, or you actually believe your corporate bosses when they talk about paying a bonus if you meet their targets.

What triggered this, you ask?

The Antidote, Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking, by Oliver Burkeman.

Once upon a time I went to a well known movie and was so disappointed a few moments after the famous line "No, Try Not. Do or Do Not, There Is No Try." Yoda hauling the spaceship out of the mud proved that someone hadn't been paying attention. Any real master worth his or her salt would have left it there as the test of whether the student was ready to leave. (And in a dose of 'there you go, bringing reality into it', just how likely is it that all the complicated equipment inside that craft would survive being immersed in a swamp?)

One of things I periodically did at work was to throw my hands in the air and shout "Yay!" when some bit of code worked, or something went right. When asked why, I said, "If I don't celebrate my little triumphs, nobody else will." 

Because while it's the moment of triumph that gets memorialized, those don't happen all that often. Usually there's a bunch of failure along the way. Now, keep in mind there's a couple kinds of failures. One is actually a partial success, in that you've ruled out an approach or determined that that idea will in fact not work, and now you know something you didn't know before. Then you can go onto the next step. Some experiments are actually set up that way. The classic example is Edison reportedly saying, I didn't fail, I just discovered 10,000 ways it won't work. And when someone went back through his notes, they probably found something that was useful in a different context, like the way post-it notes were discovered.

Some are a "doh!" moment of forehead slapping when it's realized something obvious has been overlooked, and before anything bad has happened. The following choices are usually to fix it, or to pretend the whole thing never happened. That latter choice is almost always what happens in response to failure, and there's an amusing chapter in the book about that. 

Some are long term, expensive failures that are kind of inexplicable, given the time, money, and other resources that went into it. The Ford Edsel of the late 50's comes to mind. Many of these failures are the stuff of organizational behaviour courses in university. I've heard people wondering out loud, how could they have been so stupid? Well, that's the very nature of group think. I was once part of a group that was well aware of group think, and actually discussed a story called "The Road to Abilene" as we group thought ourselves into a decision that was pretty stupid in hindsight.

If someone tells me they've never failed at anything, I figure either they've got someone greasing the skids behind the scenes, or they've never really tried anything new or hard. Or they're out and out lying. Lots of that going around. Failure is not a stigma. It's part of life.

The motivational speakers would have you believe that considering the possibility of failure is itself a failure, dooming the entire enterprise right from the get go. Bah! That's one of the ways that really bad shit happens. Because our world is complicated. Our technologies are complicated. The interactions between people are even more complicated than that. And then there's what's going on in our brains, which is so complicated we're barely beginning to understand what's happening.

For a while I took care of a database that documented the various safety incidents at a big oil and gas company. Most of them were minor, the cuts, scrapes, slips, trips, and falls, but some were major incidents, and there were even a few fatalities. There was a lot of effort put into understanding the sequence of events, and it's almost never one thing going wrong. Some of them were spur of the moment decisions that turned out badly, and had the person thought about it even for a second, things would be different. One of the major causes of incidents was someone not paying sufficient attention to the task at hand. Which explains lots of what happens on our roads. Don't get me started about demonstrations of driver incompetence. 

Some really were a WTF was he thinking? There was one that puzzled a room full of professionals, wondering how he could possibly have thought that doing that wasn't a bad idea. The hazard was obvious, had been discussed at a safety meeting. And yet he ended up in the hospital.

It's a really hard thing to do in some circumstances to ask, what could go wrong? How could this end badly, and what are the consequences of that? Really hard. There are some that dismiss the whole question, and I was in a meeting where this happened, by someone saying, 'well, sure and there could be an asteroid strike on the worksite.' Keep in mind that on some worksites, there is a procedure to open a door, because doing it without following the procedure could kill you. H2S is dangerous.

And even if you get that far, there's the whole argument about mitigation. There is a profession dedicated to figuring out if it's cheaper to avoid the incident, or to pay up afterward. In any for profit corporate environment, it's a safe bet they'll choose to pay up after, thinking, IF anything does happen, and IF it's major, and IF there's a mess, and IF we get caught, and IF the survivor(s) actually sue us, and IF they win the lawsuit, and IF it's not covered by insurance, and IF we're still in business, then we might pay up.

I've digressed far afield from the book, because it mostly deals with how to react to failure, although a line from Shakespeare sums it up, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (BC)

Peony
Linda cleared away the debris from last year's white peony. The photo I got of the stubble is blurry, but imagine if you will, some old stalks with brown grass between. In a few months there will be more beautiful blooms. Stay tuned!

Tombstone

Flower (new for 2023!)

Not sure what's growing there, but I admire their optimism. That's snow in the background, only a few inches away. The weather channel says chance of flurries today. Good luck little ones!

In an update just before hitting the publish button, I went into the kitchen to top up my coffee, and, it's snowing. Not really a surprise for this time of year, I suppose.

Film (new)

Film (old)