Techniques for managing and learning from failure in academia

Every one of us has experienced failure during our lives. In academia, perceived failure can take many forms: lack of student engagement; poor project results; rejection of an academic paper; having a grant application turned down; an unsuccessful job interview. If failure is not managed well, it can have a negative impact on our perception of our own ability and knowledge, it can damage self-confidence and prevent us from being able to carry out our daily activities effectively. To overcome this, we need to answer key questions: why is it important to learn from failure? And how can we manage it? This blog explores some answers to both questions.  

Why is it important to learn from failure?

Traditionally, failure has negative connotations, and for that reason not many of us enjoy it. To change this mindset, we need to understand that learning from failure brings advantages in both our personal and professional lives and see it as an opportunity to improve different skills, including:

Self-reflection: analysing how our values, beliefs and feelings have an impact on our actions in different scenarios. This helps us understand more about ourselves and the conditions that make us feel vulnerable, fearful or strong.

Resilience: we will enhance our ability to withstand adversity and respond to the challenges that we face. Consequently, resilience is a capability that will help us to thrive in our lives.

Creativity: improving our capability to generate new ideas and solutions to overcome different issues caused by failure.

• Failure can feel hot and shameful, but we must normalise it
• Using productive failure to activate deeper learning
• Building emotional resilience is not creating a generation of ‘snowflakes’

How can we manage and learn from failure?

To manage failure, we need to understand that internal and external factors have an impact on our ability to learn from it.  

Failure is part of the self-improvement process: Internal factors that we need to be aware of when managing and learning from failure are: first, accepting that it will happen during various points in our lives; second, understanding that failure is not an end point in our career and, instead, it is part of our self-improvement process in our personal and professional lives. To enrich this process, we need to develop self-awareness of the external and internal factors that impact our decisions and actions.

Organisational culture: One of the key external factors that has an impact on managing and learning from failure is the organisational culture where we work. It is important that the organisation’s values, mission and vision avoid a blame culture. Instead, they should welcome failure as part of a learning moment, creating opportunities for sharing mistakes and, more importantly, lessons learned with our team, analysing why things did not work instead of pointing out people. This will create a culture of compassion, trust and creativity, boosting employee morale. 

Reuse and recycle ideas/artefacts: It is well worth learning that failure brings new opportunities to showcase our work, or part of it, in a different format and to different audiences. This is an idea similar to reuse-recycle. For example, there was a time when I could not finish an academic paper about gamification of learning because of lack of motivation and workload issues. But instead of forgetting this draft in my laptop, I used some of the sections when writing blogs about pedagogy and giving presentations. In fact, I used the paper as the basis for blogs and presentations that supported my application to the senior fellowship in higher education.

Keep a repository of your victory moments: Another practice that helps me manage failure or rejection at work is having a repository of “victory” moments that I will read or watch to keep my motivation high. For example, as a course/module leader, sometimes the learning activities that I design for my lecturers do not go according to plan, and this may lead to negative feedback from students in their module evaluation. To avoid demotivation, I have kept all the positive feedback from students that I have received since I started teaching at the university. Reading these emails, notes and posts on LinkedIn can give me additional motivation to be creative and keep trying new things when the next opportunity arises.

Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to completely avoid failure and rejection – we will experience it in different moments of our personal and professional lives. Thus it is important to understand the advantages of managing it and realising there are external and internal factors that will help us to learn from it. Moreover, we should understand that when learning from failure, we might not be able to change the situation – but we can change our attitude towards how things make us feel.  

Gustavo Espinoza Ramos is a course leader and doctoral researcher at the University of Westminster, UK.

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Learning from failure - https://www.business.com/articles/learning-from-failure/

Stopping blame culture - https://hbr.org/2022/02/blame-culture-is-toxic-heres-how-to-stop-it