Commentary: It’s OK To Get It Wrong: Learning From The Taboo Of Failure

A few weeks back, I was engaged in a conversation with a new MBA student from India, who has started her program in the UK. As we discussed her background and motivations for coming to study an MBA, one thing she said stood out: “I am here to embrace the unknown, and I know I am going to be uncomfortable, but that’s OK.”

That same evening, I attended an event called “Fuckup Nights,” a community which is building a reputation around the world to break the taboo of failure. There were four speakers, all from different backgrounds and business areas, but all shared one thing in common: They had, at some point, got things wrong. The core message is that it is OK to fail and to embrace learning from that failure; it is OK to feel uncomfortable and not get things right.

These two seemingly unrelated events led me to think about how we perceive “failure” in education, a space where one would perhaps expect the narrative to be centered on embracing acceptance. However, too often I see and hear students placing significant pressure on themselves to achieve perfection in their studies. Perhaps this is reasonable given that they are often spending significant amounts of money, or have family expectations to achieve the best possible outcomes.

If you are reading this and you are a student on a university program, it is important to highlight that some failure is not a bad thing! Use your time in education to try things that move you out of your comfort zone and embrace new challenges, and don’t worry if you don’t get it right!

Creating a safe space in education settings to allow, and in fact encourage, students to get things wrong is a key learning experience. Everyone at some point in their working life experiences failure — learning how to be resilient and deal with that failure is a key learning opportunity.

If you are a faculty member reading this, it is also OK to try new things and get them wrong. I am proud to have a Learning Innovation Team in my own school. The team work to encourage and help faculty members to try new things in the classroom (new pedagogy, new approaches, new thinking) and it doesn’t always go perfectly. In fact, a year ago I personally tried a new collaborative teaching tool in a room with 300 students; we were using it (in smaller groups) to collaborate and post ideas in one shared board. Everything was going well until one student accidentally deleted the entire thing! I learned my lesson quickly: Make sure you have the contribution settings correct before you let the collaboration session begin. It was OK, I called the student back and used it as a learning moment, and we pivoted to more manual methods.

The key thing here is that the students were totally fine and accepting of this mistake, and in fact valued seeing me admit to not always getting things right. We are all human!

As I sit here in my hotel room in India, putting the final touches on this article, I am thinking about a question that I get asked by prospective students almost every time I meet with them or their parents: “Will I get a job at the end of doing this degree?” My response to that question is always, “I don’t know, but we will provide you with knowledge and skills that will set you up to be the most employable graduate possible.” It always reminds me that as universities we must ensure our curricula are designed with employability in mind. We know that all businesses are attracted to graduates who can thrive in a challenging global landscape, and thus, learning how to be resilient and cope with failure is critical. We must embrace the idea of failure and be clear how that learning can be harnessed into success.

Dr. Anthony Devine is director of Learning and Teaching at Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow.