Failure Friday #1 with Dan Ward
Summary
Key Insights
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Failure is best defined as effort not producing the desired outcome, separating actions from identity.
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Studying failure explicitly, as aviation pioneers did, accelerates innovation by identifying dead ends and promising directions.
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Octave Chanute’s 1894 book documented 400 years of flying machine failures to guide future attempts.
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National pride and geopolitics historically hindered data sharing and collective learning among aviation pioneers.
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The Wright siblings included their sister Catherine as a key collaborator often overlooked in history.
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Failure cake, a practice of gathering with cake after a failure, creates psychological safety and destigmatizes failure.
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Celebrating the attempt, not failure itself, incentivizes boldness and risk-taking within teams.
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Experiments should be framed as learning opportunities; even negative results provide valuable data.
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Language choice around failure matters and should fit the cultural and contextual environment.
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Clear definitions of success and intended impact are essential to meaningfully assess outcomes and failure.
Notable Quotes
"Failure is when effort did not produce the desired result, not putting in the effort in the first place."
"Failure is an outcome, not an identity. I may have failed, but I am not a failure."
"They studied their failures, faced them directly, and used those learnings to shape the next experiment."
"We can stop gluing feathers to wings and flapping wings; static wings are the way to fly."
"Fear, lack of data, and geopolitics kept engineers from sharing valuable failure information."
"We eat failure cake together, discuss what we learned, and plan what to do differently next time."
"We’re not celebrating failure. Failure sucks. We’re celebrating the attempt and boldness."
"The worst thing that could happen is we get cake. That changes how boldly a team tries."
"We do experiments not to make things work but to learn something new."
"Innovation is novelty with impact—something new that makes a meaningful difference."
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