Sensing a trend here? We’ve spent the last three posts talking about failure. Its been on my mind a lot lately; maybe it was just that final grades went out, and yes I had some people fail my class. Anyway, I notice when very successful people or companies talk about the value of failure. So, it certainly caught my eye in April when both of my go-to magazines had similar articles based around the recent release of Creativity Inc, written by Ed Catmull, the president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation. For Wired, it was a little sidebar that caught by eye. Entitled “Buzzkill: Pixar’s Problems” (p. 32, Issue 22.04; not online that I can find), the three section article talked about how Pixar overcomes issues.
Imagine that? Rather than assuming someone else is going to save them, or thinking failure certainly should never come their way, Pixar’s leaders realize that failure is a good thing. One of the points that Wired pointed out was that on both the movies Brave and Ratatouille, the scripts ended up with directors that didn’t work out. The movies, thus, experience failure. The key leader wasn’t working out.
Rather than acting like failure shouldn’t happen or that they should simply pretend no failure happened, the directors were quickly replaced and the movies moved forward. Or they didn’t….in one recent case, a movie to be called Newt, Pixar decided that the problems in the script simply could not be overcome. So, it was shut down after two years of development (translation—after millions of dollars were spent). At my college and around the country, so often people act like to declare failure is some huge, well, failure.
No….pressing on with a clear problem that was not producing the needed result…THAT WOULD BE FAILURE. For Pixar, according to Catmull, “failures are as much a part of the studio’s process as the hits.” Or maybe to jog your memory back to my first post 
on this point about failure, if we just accept a path that supposedly protects us from the risk of failure, we end up floating on chairs as in the movie Wall-e. For Pixar, and apparently Catmull, that is not the right path.
Actually, according to Fast Company, all of their ideas and movies start out, well, uh, here’s how he said it—“ When we first put up something–these stories suck.” Pretty revealing and honest…yet not surprising from a man who accepts that failure is a part of the process.
Listen to Catmull talking about knowing that things will go wrong, and in the going wrong, new lessons will be learned:
Still, in every turnaround case, we did miss something. We screwed up. Whenever one of these things happens, we analyze it to see, what did we miss? And we draw new conclusions. Sometimes the conclusion we reach actually runs against a decision we reached years before. When we’ve done something and figured it’s right, we operate according to that. But something new can come along and we realize we misread the original event. We did not interpret it correctly, so now we’ll try something different.
No way…a leader who understands that failure is a normal part of the process.
Look, I realize we all want to succeed. I sure do. And I want to avoid failure if at all possible. I like to make good choices and make no errors. We think we are helping our children when we aid them. However, in the long run, we are hurting more. I wrote earlier about how we all learned to walk through failure. The rest of life is the same way. We try, we stumble, we fall, we get back up and try again or try something new. You really only have true disaster when you simply refuse to try.
And that is almost where we are now. Students withdraw from classes at the first sign of any big effort needed. “Oh my gosh, I might fail.” So, we expect professors to, apparently, just pass people along anyway. But whether an accountant, a beautician or a surgeon….do you really want someone who was merely passed through the classes? Of course not.
We need to embrace the reality that you won’t avoid failure. Not only do you learn through failure, you gain a good dose of humility. Then, as you go forward…perhaps no longer in college but in something better for you, or maybe still in college but in a new field that really matches your strengths….as you go forward, you go with learning that impacts your future behavior.
Catmull and Pixar understands this. I hope you will as well: