#TMOxfail - teachers learning from things that didn't work

TeachMeet, a UK-based meetup organization focused on education, announced #TMOxfail, a gathering on July 11 in Oxford, England:

Having run a couple of conventional 'sharing best practice' TeachMeets, we'd like to add a different twist to this one. You are invited to come along to present and share experiences of, rather than what that worked well, activities, lessons, approaches or strategies which you tried, but which didn't work out so well! Why would anyone want to do that? Well, #TMOxfail is offered in the belief that:

- we learn as much, probably more, from reflecting on failure as we do by focusing on success
- sharing best practice can be useful and inspiring; so can the honesty and openness which comes from talking about when things go wrong
- as teachers, we can be too quick to feel bad when things go wrong - by discussing these things openly, we can develop a 'growth mindset' culture in which it's OK to fail, as long as we reflect, renew and build again

We are looking for either 2 minute (nano) presentations, or 7 minute (micro) presentations in which you might talk about:
- An activity, lesson, approach or strategy that you tried and what you were hoping for
- What happened in reality and what you think went wrong
- What you learnt from the experience, and how you would / did do it differently next time

[Note the reference to Carol Dweck's work on the "growth mindset."]

I wish the #TMOxfail folks all success in their venture. I wonder if they might be willing to post some of their presentations and share their stories here?

Quick change of subject: let me take this opportunity to point out a new feature. Now that there are nearly 500 posts on the site, navigation for new readers is an issue. So, I've created a handful of key categories (listed on the right-hand column), which collect posts that relate to that category. If you are interested in learning more about the role of failure and mistakes in startups, click that link. You will be presented with a much smaller set of posts, all of which are related to startups.

Not coincidentally, one of these key categories is Education :)

[Hat tip Tim Harford]

Carol Dweck - fixed mindsetters take outsized risks

Carol Dweck is one of the thinkers that continues to inspire me. Her insights on learning (in her words, between people with fixed mindsets and growth mindsets) sheds light on how some of us refuse to learn from mistakes, and how others absorb the lessons and succeed all the more. [This is a marvelous graphic illustrating the two mindsets.]

Her recent post on HBR.com, "Warning Signs of an Unhealthy Appetite for Risk," discusses how the trap of the fixed mindset, in which talents are perceived to be innate, not developed, can lead people to overestimate their abilities and desire to show off - a cocktail for risky behavior.

The piece also had a quote that got my mind working:

In another study with David Nussbaum, students at a top university were told they had done poorly on a test of their abilities, and were then offered the chance to see and learn from the strategies used by people who had taken the test before them. What did they do? Those with a growth mindset chose to look at the strategies of people who had done far better than they had — they wanted to improve. But those with a fixed mindset chose to look at the strategies of people who had done worse than they had. Why? They wanted to feel superior. And after doing so, they reported that they, indeed, now had a high opinion of their abilities. People with a fixed mindset ignore the warning signs.

This reminded me of a story from a time when I certainly had a very fixed mindset - in college.

As a senior, I had reserved one of my two pass-fail classes for my final semester. I chose Drawing I. It seemed like a change of pace from my engineering curriculum, and a friend was taking it too. Why not? I thought.

I was convinced that I sucked at drawing. And my first drawings lived down to that self-image. So I developed a strategy. (Which wasn't to try hard to improve my craft.) Each time we had completed a drawing or sketch, we hung it on the wall and the professor would critique them. I learned very quickly to hang back while everyone posted their drawings. Then I would find the poorest drawing of all, and hang mine next to it.

This strategy had the desired effect: the teacher's critiques were more muted than they would have been if my drawing had been in the company of better ones.

I didn't improve much over the course of the semester - though I did pass. And years later, I regretted not taking more advantage of that opportunity to practice and learn to draw better. But, of course, that was when I had seen the advantage of the growth mindset.

[If you want to see my drawing skills in action, here you are:]

Carol Dweck interviewed... and learning to type

Harvard Business Review has released an 18-minute interview with the author of one of our favorite books of 2011, Stanford scholar Carol Dweck. She discusses her favorite subject (and one of ours): fixed and growth mindsets.

The entire interview is great, but one powerful section discusses how to give feedback when things don't go as planned. It's as good a summary of the value of companies learning from mistakes and failure as I've seen. Says Dweck:

The person giving the feedback needs to focus on...how they engaged in the process, maybe as a team, what strategies they tried, how they gauge when and whether those strategies were being successful, whether they were sensitive enough to change strategies when they were starting to get the negative feedback. How they went forward, how they corrected themselves. And why, in the end, it might not have worked and what they might do differently next time.

One CEO I talked to rewards value added. Being able to put knowledge or skills back into the company - even when a project wasn't successful.

[Interviewer] Can you say a little more about that? What do you mean, "putting back into the company"?

[Dweck] What did a team or a person learn from an effort, even when it wasn't successful? Many successful people - Einstein, Thomas Edison - say they've learned more from their failures than often from their successes. So many huge breakthroughs came after a number of huge failures that provided learning experiences. You're not going to reward someone just because they failed, but what did the journey teach them that will help them and others in the company become successful the next time? So as people are engaging in a process, in a project, they are monitoring what worked and what didn't, to feed it back into the company to make it a communal learning experience, the more that is reward-worthy.

Here's a personal growth-mindset story. One winter in my mid-thirties, I went through a slow phase at work. I decided that I should learn to touch-type. After twenty-plus years of two-finger typing (including writing a novel and writing thousands of lines of code), I downloaded a typing tutor and, over a two month period, learned to touch type. It was difficult. I was utterly incompetent. But with practice, I was able to learn it.

This is one of my favorite memories. I thought I might be too old (and too accomplished) to learn much new. Instead, with practice, I went from not being able to do something to having that ability.

You can access the full Carol Dweck interview here.

Best Books of the Year 2011

It has been a spectacular year for books about mistakes and learning from them. Here's the list of must-haves:

1. Brilliant Mistakes, Paul Schoemaker. Five years after publishing a terrific HBR article on the subject, Schoemaker celebrates mistakes as, in Joyce's words, "portals of discovery," a way of navigating through a largely unpredictable world. And he presents a compelling case for making "deliberate mistakes"--creating projects that go against the conventional wisdom in a strategic way, in order to uncover invalid assumptions and shifts in the environment. From Schoemaker: Companies strive for error elimination, hiring advisers and relying on sophisticated management tools such as Six Sigma. It’s little wonder, then, that most decision-making books follow suit, encouraging you to focus narrowly on mistake avoidance today rather than provoking you to plan for the stream of decisions that you will face tomorrow.

2. The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. A mammoth research project that tracked the activity and temperament of dozens of workers and managers on a daily basis brought forth a simple, startling insight: workers are happier and more productive when they make continual progress toward meaningful goals, and unhappy/unmotivated when obstacles are put in their way. The application of this insight improves both managers' effectiveness and workers' self-regard. Why is this book on the Mistake Bank list? Because the authors urge managers and workers to face reality, even if it's unpleasant, and handle setbacks with grace and persistence. From the book: By its very nature, meaningful work is hard; people often get the greatest satisfaction from overcoming the most difficult challenges. Failure is inevitable along the path to innovation. Though you should try to minimize obstacles and setbacks under your control, you can never create a problem-free bubble for your people. You can't nourish inner work life if you drive yourself and your team crazy trying to avoid all problems. Rather, focus on providing people with the catalysts and nourishers they need to overcome the obstacles they will inevitably face.

3. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman. One of the fathers of behavioral economics and a Nobel Prize winner, Kahneman sums up the lessons he's learned in his decades of studying human nature - and is not above using himself as a subject. Kahneman writes: One of [my] themes is that people who face a difficult question often answer an easier one instead, without realizing it. We were required to predict a soldier's performance in officer training and in combat, but we did so by evaluating his behavior over one hour in an artificial situation. This was a perfect instance of a general rule that I call WYSIATI, "What you see is all there is." We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual's future, which was almost everything that would actually matter.

4. Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others, Justin Menkes. A book that illustrates what corporate senior leaders need to do to succeed. Menkes describes great executives' understanding of their own fallibility and their willingness to take responsibility for mistakes ("owning their missteps") as keys to flourishing in the pressure-cooker of corporate leadership. From Menkes: Leaders adjusting to a significant increase in responsibility invariably make many mistakes. Those who ultimately excel recognize and own these missteps quickly and use the experiences to grow into their positions of elevated authority and increased complexity. But for this learning curve to occur, it is absolutely crucial that they accept their role in these mistakes. If they have a low sense of agency, they cannot, and will fail.

5. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck. I'm cheating here - "Mindset" was published in 2006. But I didn't read it till this year, and without a doubt Dweck's research and writing are among the most influential in the learning field, especially among other academics. She was referenced in more of my reading than any other scholar (Kahneman was #2).

From Dweck: Tom Wolfe, in The Right Stuff, describes the elite military pilots who eagerly embrace the fixed mindset. Having passed one rigorous test after another, they think of themselves as special, as people who were born smarter and braver than other people. But Chuck Yeager, the hero of The Right Stuff, begged to differ. “There is no such thing as a natural-born pilot. Whatever my aptitude or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime’s learning experience.… The best pilots fly more than the others; that’s why they’re the best.”

What were the best business books you read this year? Weigh in below in the comments section.

Seth Godin: Keep exerting "righteous effort," especially after failing

In "After You've Done Your Best (and It Didn't Work)," Seth Godin writes this:

Early in our careers, we're encouraged to avoid failure, and one way we do that is by building up a set of emotions around failure, emotions we try to avoid, and emotions that we associate with the effort of people who fail. It turns out that this is precisely the opposite of the approach of people who end up succeeding.

If you believe that righteous effort leads to the shame of personal failure, you'll seek to avoid righteous effort.

This is precisely what Carol Dweck finds when she studies people with the "fixed mindset" - setbacks cause their effort to decrease, not increase, because they seek to avoid failure (or give themselves excuses for it), rather than learn from it.

It also sounds quite a bit like what Mona Simpson said of her brother Steve Jobs: "He was never embarrassed about working hard, even if the results were failures."

Poster child for the fixed mindset: David Brent of "The Office"

I love the British "Office" and Ricky Gervais' character is possibly the most outstanding example of the bad manager archetype ever captured. He is constantly looking for affirmation of his knowledge and capabilities. The fact that he lacks these in spades is the basis for much of the comedy on "The Office."

Carol Dweck in her book "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success."describes the concept of the fixed mindset, where you believe that you are defined by your innate traits; one side effect is that you see yourself as superior to others due to your natural gifts:

Tom Wolfe, in The Right Stuff, describes the elite military pilots who eagerly embrace the fixed mindset. Having passed one rigorous test after another, they think of themselves as special, as people who were born smarter and braver than other people. But Chuck Yeager, the hero of The Right Stuff, begged to differ. “There is no such thing as a natural-born pilot. Whatever my aptitude or talents, becoming a proficient pilot was hard work, really a lifetime’s learning experience.… The best pilots fly more than the others; that’s why they’re the best.”

With the fixed mindset, failure is anything but a learning opportunity; it's a verdict on your worth as a person. Given that, it's not surprising that people with the fixed mindset crave affirmation and positive feedback, and are often devastated by negative feedback.

With that, I wanted to share a bit of my favorite episode of "The Office," in which David Brent hires a customer service trainer to teach his staff how to improve their customer service. But Brent can't help butting in, disrupting the class and undermining the trainer, to show that he knows more about the subject than the trainer himself. He is looking for more than attention, he's looking for admiration and validation.

When I first watched this episode, I laughed hard over and over. But, at the same time, I had this curious parallel reaction: "Hey, I've been David Brent. I've been in this same situation before and acted the same way. Oh, my...."

Yes, it's true, I am a recovering member of the fixed-mindset club.

Jim Marshall's wrong way fumble recovery

I had forgotten about old-time Minnesota Viking Jim Marshall's story until reminded of it in Carol Dweck's book "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success." Here's how Dweck captures the story:

Jim Marshall, former defensive player for the Minnesota Vikings, relates what could easily have made him into a failure. In a game against the San Francisco 49ers, Marshall spotted the football on the ground. He scooped it up and ran for a touchdown as the crowd cheered. But he ran the wrong way. He scored for the wrong team and on national television. It was the most devastating moment of his life. The shame was overpowering. But during halftime, he thought, “If you make a mistake, you got to make it right. I realized I had a choice. I could sit in my misery or I could do something about it."

Marshall played 15 more years, appeared in 4 Super Bowls, and set the record for most fumbles recovered in a career (only one went the wrong way).

Here's the play itself, from 1964:

Dweck: exceptional people convert setbacks to successes

From Carol Dweck's marvelous book "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success," a summary of her research about the effects of mindset on approaches to learning. Dweck differentiates between people with "fixed mindsets," who feel that intelligence is fixed, and those with "growth mindsets," who believe intelligence can be improved through work and study. Growth-mindset individuals see mistakes and failures as learning opportunities, while fixed-mindsetters see them as negative reflections of their capabilities.


Dweck's work underpins much of the research about learning from mistakes, and has been well-represented on this site.

The other thing exceptional people seem to have is a special talent for converting life’s setbacks into future successes. Creativity researchers concur. In a poll of 143 creativity researchers, there was wide agreement about the number one ingredient in creative achievement. And it was exactly the kind of perseverance and resilience produced by the growth mindset. [p.11]

Jonah Lehrer: it's important to find "the upside of error"

Jonah Lehrer takes up our favorite subject in his Wall Street Journal Saturday column ("The Art of Failing Successfully"). He refers to the work of Carol Dweck (of course), and includes this nugget:

The psychologist David Nussbaum has shown that whether we tend to learn from mistakes or brush them aside, the response is rooted in repairing our self-esteem. Failure is never fun, but success requires that we learn to fight through our frustration and find the upside of error.

Lehrer also refers to this Bob Dylan song that contains the lyric, "there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all." Enigmatic, just like its creator!

For learning, "knowledge-hungry" beats "grade-hungry" every time

In this Newsweek NurtureShock post, Po Bronson references an experiment by Stanford researcher Carol Dweck - the pioneer of looking at students' views of achievement vs. learning.

Bronson effortlessly summarizes a complex set of experiments by Dweck and co-researcher Jennifer Mangels, and you should read the entire post, but the major point was this: "knowledge-hungry" (in Bronson's terminology) students learned better from their mistakes than "grade-hungry" students. Knowledge-hungry students were interested in where they had made mistakes so they could learn the correct answer. Grade-hungry students were more concerned simply that they had made a mistake - the error itself obsessed them, not what they didn't know. As a result, knowledge-hungry students did better on a retest: they learned better.

Even when we leave school and enter the work world, we often remain "grade-hungry." Companies, frankly, enable and reward this focus with their HR management tools: promotions, numerical performance reviews, "merit" raises. Workers tend to be more concerned about the effect a mistake will have on these measures than on learning from what they did. This is bad for the company, of course. And bad for the worker.

"Failure is just evidence that you haven't mastered the task yet"

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson has an important article in the July 2008 HBR that says a lot of things about learning in the business world. The following excerpt has some particular relevancy to The Mistake Bank:

In her research on individual mind-set differences, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has shown that the way children view a task affects their persistence and performance over time. Some children think of human ability or intelligence as fixed and, consequently, think of school tasks as performance opportunities--moments of truth that prove whether they're smart [JC note: call it the Hermione Granger syndrome]. For these children, performing poorly on an assignment or a test would demonstrate that they lacked intelligence rather than indicating that they had more to learn. Believing that the point of execution is to demonstrate competence, they go out of their way to pick easier tasks. Of course, this means they lose out when it comes to learning. This same mind-set encourages managers to admire and expect to be rewarded for decisiveness, efficiency, and action rather than for reflection, inquiry, and collaboration, the uncertainty of which makes them uncomfortable. Like the children who have learned to shun new challenges, these managers avoid, and help others avoid, the risks of questions and experiments.

In psychologically safe environments, people are willing to offer up ideas, questions, concerns - they are even willing to fail - and when they do, they learn. In her studies, Dweck found that some children - those who early on were rewarded for effort and creativity more than for simply giving the right answer - see intelligence as something malleable that improves with attention and effort. Tasks are opportunities for learning; failure is just evidence that they haven't mastered the task yet. Driven by curiosity about what will and will not work, they experiment. When things don't pan out, the don't give up or see themselves as inadequate. They pay attention to what went wrong and try something different next time. In adults, such a mind-set allows managers to strike the right tone of openness, humility, curiosity, and humor in ways that encourage their teams to learn."

Dweck's research on "growth" vs. "fixed" mindsets has a lot to say about whether we can learn from our mistakes or be paralyzed by them.