The last few years has seen the business world fall in love with failure.  The idea is that not only are you more likely to fail when you’re truly pushing the boundaries of what you’re individually and collectively capable of, but this process provides you with invaluable lessons to help you improve.

New research from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business suggests that might not actually be the case.  In various experiments, they find that failure might actually undermine learning rather than support it.

“We are taught to learn from failure, to celebrate failure, to fail forward,” the researchers say.  “Graduation speeches often talk about how much you should dare to fail and learn from your failures. And managers talk about the lessons that they personally had from failures. If you just listen to public speaking, you would think that we are pretty tuned in to failures. However, this is not the case.”

Failing badly

Across five distinct experiments, the researchers asked 1,600 or so volunteers to answer a number of binary-choice questions.  For instance, in one of the experiments, participants were asked to state whether companies lose around $90 billion or $60 billion due to poor customer service each year.

The binary nature of the questions meant that participants should instantly know the right answer as soon as they received feedback on their original guess.  Each was subsequently re-tested on the content from the original question to see if they had indeed learned from the feedback or not.

Strangely, this didn’t seem to be the case, with participants seeming to learn less from failure than they did from success, even when the learning from failure was relatively easy, cognitively speaking.  What’s more, this phenomenon even endured when learning was incentivized.

“With more experiments, what we were able to see is that it’s really a matter of self-esteem,” the researchers say. “It just doesn’t feel good to fail, so people tune out.”

To further test this hypothesis, the researchers conducted an experiment whereby ego was removed from the process.  This involved the volunteers viewing other people’s successes and failures.  This simple intervention did indeed appear to change things, as whereas when reflecting on their own experience, people learned more from success than failure, when reflecting on other people’s experiences, both success and failure were equally powerful.

“To the extent that failures are being ignored, to the extent that we actually tune out rather than tune in, then there is no learning whatsoever from failures,” the researchers say. “And when there is no learning from failures, that’s quite in contrast with the general impression that failures were teachable moments in our life. Most of the times when we failed, we just didn’t pay attention.”

The authors believe their findings have significant implications, not only in the way we approach the ‘failing is good’ ethos within companies, but also more broadly in terms of how we approach learning and development.  Being personally exposed to failure may do more harm than good.