Learning to Fail Forward

• The traditional higher education system of performance-based grading teaches students to fear failure, which limits their capacity to think creatively and generate new ideas.
• To inspire innovation, business schools should support a learning environment that embraces experimentation and encourages retrying and relearning.
• Business schools can also learn from their unsuccessful efforts, taking away valuable insights and applying them to new approaches.

 
Learn about AACSB's Innovations That Inspire program at aacsb.edu/innovations-that-inspire.

Transcript

Parag Patel: [0:15] The people should be allowed to fail. Once we agree to continuously experiment, we also agree to embrace failures. I have witnessed that sometimes when experiments don't work well, they're remembered in a very different way in the institutional memory.

[0:44] If there's a culture of experimenting, then failing fast, and then picking up the next experiment, that will lead to a culture of continuous innovation.

Ben Eng: [0:56] Through our teaching and exams, we've taught students to avoid failure, but what we have to do is reteach students to help them realize that failure is not just essential but inevitable. If you're going to innovate, then you have to experiment, and if you're going to experiment, you have to fail.

[1:15] What we have to do, is we have to teach students that, give them the mindset that they have to treat successes and failures equally as opportunities to learn.

Madhavi Gokhale: [1:25] When we create those aha learning moments inside the classroom, we demonstrate how we can come up with innovative solutions because we constantly encourage them to relearn, unlearn, and think what no one else is thinking. We try to create a safe space for them to make them understand that it's OK to fail, because the success mindset is anathema for the innovative mindset.

Through our teaching and exams, we've taught students to avoid failure, but what we have to do is reteach students to help them realize that failure is not just essential but inevitable.

Subbu Sivaramakrishnan: [1:59] We, first of all, need to move our students from a performance orientation to a learning orientation. What I mean by that is, what students are worried about when they take a course are the grades. That kills their creativity and innovativeness.

[2:16] Instead, we should instill in students a desire to learn, regardless of how their performance turns out. We should allow students to fail because if we are risk averse, then that kills innovation. Students should be taught that it's OK to fail, but then try again, and eventually you'll come up with a great idea.

[2:42] For that, we need to have an education system in place that rewards effort and thinking over measuring students' performance based on their grades and GPA. Plus, students need to be taught that, especially if they're working in say, a service industry, and this applies to manufacturing industries as well, constant innovation is absolutely necessary to survive.

[3:13] This is even more important in services because no matter what great idea you come up with today, somebody can copy it tomorrow. As long as students are taught that and they understand that, and we create a culture and atmosphere where they are not afraid to take risks, it will build innovativeness among our students.

We should allow students to fail because if we are risk averse, then that kills innovation. Students should be taught that it's OK to fail, but then try again.

Sri Zaheer: [3:36] A great example of this fail-fast-forward approach that we're taking is a program that we introduced for congressional staffers in Washington, DC. It was our very first online program. We'd never done a fully online program before that. It came at the behest of our corporate community.

[3:58] They felt that those staffers were making policy and knew nothing about business, and that it would be a great idea to educate them. We put this program together, but we couldn't quite meet our milestones in terms of...

[4:11] We had certain milestones and expectations of enrollment. We had designed it around what we thought were the staffer schedules, more work in summer, less work when Congress is in session, all of that, but it wasn't quite what we had expected at all. These staffers were busy, extremely busy year-round, whether Congress was in session or not.

[4:36] On top of it, we realized that there were certain things that we weren't equipped to deal with the 24/7 online expectation that the students had in terms of technology, support, and help. In about two years, we reabsorbed those students into our regular part-time online program, and we ended up learning so much.

[4:58] The program didn't succeed the way we had imagined it would, but we learned so much from it. That's the way you sponsor this culture of innovation.