The truth is, we
set ourselves up
for failure
Children in modern life are, rather notoriously, never
allowed to experience anything remotely like failure
(heaven forbid they miss out on a ‘pass the parcel’
prize). As a result, failure hits them hard
when real life refuses to grade them on a curve
suspended over a padded floor with a loving
acceptance of ‘their own special spelling’.
Of course it’s easy to pick on children and no-one will
thank us for it, so let’s turn our attention to the adult
world. The same can be said of most corporate and
government processes, business systems and selfmanagement programs. The more you set strategy or
design systems without a consciousness of even the
possibility of failure, the greater the chance of realising
that failure actually is. Diets — or ‘wellness programs’
as they have come to be euphemised — are famous
for simultaneously promising the virtually impossible in
record time, and for almost universally failing to provide
lasting results. And yet, the more preposterous the
claim and the more inflated the possibility, the more
these books, powders, audio-programs and reality
television shows seem to sell.
What’s more concerning is that when we do eventually
fail or backslide (the faith-based terminology is not
coincidental), we end up blaming ourselves rather than
the system we’ve bought into. We desperately selfflagellate as our internal dialogue runs to phrases such
as, ‘I’m weak … I’m hopeless … I can’t do it …’ and so
the cycle continues.
By ignoring the possibility of failure in our thinking,
we unwittingly increase the chances of it ultimately
eventuating. Contrast this strategy with the design
parameters of commercial aircraft. In 2012, while
speaking at an international business summit in
Bangkok, Thailand, we struck up a conversation with
another speaker, Richard de Crespigny. Richard is
the Qantas pilot who successfully landed QF32, the
Airbus A380 that, en route from Singapore to Sydney,
experienced catastrophic engine failure causing an
enormous hole in the wing (which, it is pretty well
agreed by all flying experts, is rather a bad thing to
happen!).
In a typically Australian, self-deprecating way, Richard
is quick to deflect credit for the safe arrival away from
his skills as a pilot and onto his crew and his aircraft. But
when you probe a little deeper into his story, you really
do get a sense of just how ‘foolproof’ the systems built
into the A380 actually are.
It turns out that all commercial aircraft are designed
with the possibility that they may crash taken into
consideration. And this stretches to considerably more
than the life vest and its amazing light and whistle
combination (which no doubt is immensely reassuring
as you bob up and down in the middle of a vast
ocean). Failure, it turns out, is actually factored into the
engineering.
In other words, when a system suffers a serious failure,
the plane will, in most cases, stay in the air. It is only
in the very unlikely event of multiple system failures of
significant magnitude that you may really want to locate
the nearest exit (if only to be sure of where holes in the
plane are supposed to be).
But even this understates the over-engineering involved
in the building of the A380 (given the successful
landing of QF32, the term ‘over-engineering’ may
be an overstatement in itself). According to de
Crespigny’s account, the aircraft exceeded even his
expectations and what most pilots would consider its
baseline specifications. The plane simply refused to
let a ridiculously long string of errors lead to complete
failure.
So it appears that, when it comes to things where our
lives are at stake (such as sitting in a metal chair at 9000
metres while travelling at 800 kilometres per hour) we
start to get a little more realistic about our chances
of success and in fact we improve those chances by
preparing for the chance of failure.
So how is it that we set ourselves up for failure?