Learning from failure

From LLN

Learning from failure

Contents

Introduction (Walt Crawford)

We tend to share successes, perhaps not as often or as well as we could. We tend not to share failures. I suspect many of us even avoid the word itself, preferring "qualified success" or "learning experience" or "premature innovation" or...

For now, let's define Failure as:

An initiative or process that was either terminated before a planned ending date or that failed to achieve the stated goals.

I'll assert that any good failure is indeed a learning experience, and that we may learn more from failure than from success. I'll also assert that the library field would be stronger if we shared our failures.

Meredith Farkas created the estimable Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki, usually known as Library Success Wiki. Farkas agrees that we should share our failures. I've started a Learning from failure page there with hopes that people will contribute--I thought Library Failures: A Learning Experience Wiki was doomed from the start.

Farkas begins, offering her own thoughts on "Sharing the bad stuff, learning from failures."

Sharing the bad stuff, learning from failures (Meredith Farkas)

Originally appeared in somewhat different form as a December 16, 2007 post at Information wants to be free. Used and adapted by permission.

There are some libraries that most of us think must be the best places to work ever because of the innovation that goes on there. And in some cases, we may be right. But not always. I think we often assume that places that have good people are good places to work, and that doesn’t necessarily follow. Some people may be innovating in spite of their place of work. I only learned this when I talked to someone who’d left a job at a library I thought must be “utopia” and discovered that it was anything but. However, you’d never know it from that person’s blog.

Obviously, we walk a fine line when we blog about work. I think we all find the line that works for us and our colleagues and avoid crossing it. There’s no one-size-fits-all standard, because some places of work would be furious if you even criticized a vendor and others are very cool with radical transparency. I worry though when I see people making assumptions about someone’s place of work based on what they did (or more importantly didn’t) blog. Someone whose goal was to work in a library developing “killer apps” once wanted to work at my library because they figured if I was there it must be an innovative place. I’m not saying we’re not change agents at my library (because we are; I’m always impressed by how open to change my colleagues are), but we’re not high enough on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to have an employee who just develops killer apps. Even our Electronic Resources Librarian also teaches English 101 classes, works reference and has a liaison area.

Why do I blog? I blog to start a dialog and to bring up issues I’m having in the hopes that it will help others. I’ve written about the problems I had with performance anxiety in the past because I know there are a lot of people who think it’s an insurmountable problem (heck, I did). I wrote about ALA and martyrdom because I knew there were other people feeling like maybe they’re a bad librarian for not wanting to spend their hard-earned money to participate in ALA (because I have). When I present on wikis, I often talk about my early failures with wikis at work because they offer some good lessons about how to ensure staff buy-in (I sure learned a few). Maybe it’s the former psychotherapist in me who still likes to help people in this way, even if it makes me look less “perfect.” There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re the only person going through something. Just knowing that someone else is going through what you’re going through is often enough to keep you from falling into the well of self-blame, self-pity and bitterness. Hearing other people’s stories has been helpful to me too. Thanks to those of you who’ve shared them publicly and privately with me.

Celebrating failures

I think it’s important that we find ways to talk about “the tough stuff.” So many people are feeling the same things and have no one to share it with. Some may think they’re the only person going through this in their career and may perhaps blame themselves for something that just is a reality in our profession. Someone may fail at something and get so discouraged that they never try again (not realizing that a lot of the most successful people have failed time and again). I’m not entirely sure why I get spammed by Dyson, but one of the e-mails I got from them was entitled James Dyson on Celebrating Failure:

When an everyday product doesn’t work properly, our scientists and engineers do something about it. They develop prototypes, and test. Develop new ideas, and test again. And again. And many times they fail. But it’s through those failures they learn even more, inventing better technologies that no one else has thought of before. This was James Dyson’s process in his original workshop, and is the process he leads today.

Man, if only all of my spam was so inspirational! We should write about and celebrate our failures. We should brainstorm with others and figure out what we could have/should have done differently so that we’ll do better next time. When we’re embarrassed about our failures or sweep them under the rug, we’re depriving ourselves and others of a valuable learning experience.

Alan Kirk Gray mentioned at Computers in Libraries 2007 that there should be a Library Failures Wiki, since we learn so much more from our failures than our successes. I have to agree (though I’ll let someone else create that one). It’s the times that things went wrong (both with technologies and my career) that I’ve learned the most from. But will people be as willing to share their failures as they are to share their successes? Probably not, and I find that unfortunate.

Failure isn't sexy

Failure isn’t sexy. Disclosing problems isn’t good for your brand. I’ve been given advice to think about my brand when I write a post. “My brand” is human being, with strengths and weaknesses and just as many issues as everyone else. Sure, I could only write the good stuff. I could create a Meredith Farkas brand that is always 100% positive and only focused on the good things I do, but would that be me? And if I got a job based on a brand I’ve created online that doesn’t reflect the reality of who I am on a day-to-day basis, I think everyone involved would end up disappointed (including me). This blog is me and I am this blog. I think anyone who has met me in person would agree that I’m not shockingly different than how you pictured me (other than not being as tall… for some reason people seem to expect me to be tall).

Dorothea Salo wrote an incredibly honest post yesterday reflecting on her year (a year with lots of really impressive accomplishments) and her anxiety about the future of the area of our profession she’s hitched her star to:

I’d be a perfectly happy camper… if I didn’t have the nagging sense that the world is passing institutional repositories by, and me along with them. We’re just not where the action is right now, not in preservation and not in open access. Mind, I’m not worried about open access; it’s doing just dandy these days. I’m not even worried (much) about green open access; disciplinary repositories are popping up like mushrooms and growing like weeds. But I’m not an open-access advocate at MPOW, just a repository-rat—and it’s a damn big ship I’m on, and I’m one very small rat... Ah, well. I’m still working on this being-stuck business. When I have something, I’ll let everybody know. In the meantime… it’s been quite a year.

I applaud Dorothea for her bravery in sharing some very difficult feelings about the place she’s at now in her career. I’d be willing to bet that she is not the only person feeling stuck like this in the niche she’s created for herself in the profession. I’ll bet lots of people feel that way and maybe if they read her post, they’ll feel a little less alone. Maybe they’ll e-mail her and will be able to share ideas and support each other. Maybe someone will offer her useful advice. Dorothea could have kept this all to herself… could have never admitted to these anxieties, but in writing this, she opens up the possibilities for people offering help and support as well as the possibility that what she’s writing could support others.

I know it isn’t always easy--or possible--to share the difficult issues in our career. There have been times that I’ve gotten burned (not in my day-job) by organizations that I just couldn’t write about because it would have gone over the line I’ve put up for my own blogging. There have been things that I didn’t share because I didn’t think it would serve anyone but me to write about it (and I don’t see my blog as a space to just vent — that’s what spouses are for!). But when we can, we should try to share our failures and difficulties as well as our successes. Things don’t always come easy for me. Though I do feel incredibly lucky, I’ve worked for everything I’ve had and I’ve had plenty of bumps and frustrations along the way. We need to share those bumps, if only to encourage others and to make people feel a little less alone (though often just reading one’s own reflections can lead to greater insight). We can all learn from the hard stuff.

Comments and reactions

  • [Walt Crawford:] I certainly agree that we can learn more from “failure stories” than success stories, at least in some cases–-and I’ve urged people to tell their unsuccess stories on the Library Success wiki. Does it happen much? No. Will it? Probably not. I certainly understand why people don’t want to talk about failures, even when they’re really “failures”–-false starts and directions that had to be changed after recognizing a problem. (Would I be more likely than others to discuss failures? Probably not.) It’s even hard to write about negative successes: That is, cases where you succeed by not doing the wrong thing. I’ve had a few of those in the past, and while I’m proud of them, it’s a perverse pride that’s truly hard to share...particularly when those advocating for an unworkable solution usually don’t, in their heart of hearts, believe it was unworkable.
  • ["Kelly," edited excerpts:] As far as sharing failures--it can be politically fraught. I once had a poster accepted to a small library conference that would have showed the challenges in implementing a digital library and collaborative space. I was not overly negative, but my employer ended up nixing the project because they felt that showing they had challenges put them in a bad light! People in the knowledge management area often have this very same issue--people take these efforts quite personally, and so often employers will not permit challenges to be shared... This is a widespread cultural issue. I think it is changing at the grassroots level, in that more people want to share, but it may take time before they feel able to share.
  • Steve Campion posted "Sharing the bad" on December 20, 2007 at LibraryStream, responding to Farkas' post. Excerpts: "We need to share failures in the workplace. The library community needs to hear what doesn’t work in addition to what does. We need to learn from each other, good or bad. Expressing the bad isn’t always easy, though... Transparent libraries are still rare. If you speak on behalf of an organization, you have to watch your tongue. Even if you speak independently, you often feel obligated to err on the side of caution... I like Alan Kirk Gray’s suggestion of a Library Failures Wiki. It could be a valuable tool allowing us to share common problems. More people might contribute and more experiences might be exchanged if anonymity was part of the forum. Our objective wouldn’t be to embarrass our libraries, after all, but to help improve them. Getting publicly specific about failure isn’t always the best course when the culture in which you work is not yet transparent."

Tolerating risk (Alan Kirk Gray)

In her post, Meredith Farkas linked to Alan Kirk Gray's blog. Here's the post in which he suggests a Library Failures Wiki. Excerpts from the post:

For many of us, it's far better to avoid a potential problem--some kind of failure--even though it means passing up the likelihood of greater success. What does that yield? Rules that cause hardship for all patrons because of the actions of a few... Could it be that complex cataloging rules and hand-crafting mean that we can find what we're looking for all the time...and we never want to fail, even if that means our patrons are missing the ease of use that Amazon gives them?
Pick the greatest peeve you have with your library and think about how it could be remedied if you were willing to bear the possibility that you might screw up when you tried to fix it. You know what, we need a Library Failures wiki more than we need a list of successful best practices. I bet we would learn more... Look around your risk-free library and see if you can't find some uncertainty to dive into.

Negative success stories (Walt Crawford)

In my comment on Farkas' post, I mentioned "negative success"--cases where you succeed by not doing something badly. That's a particularly tough area, given that the whole concept is out of joint with the idea of trying everything you can and hoping that some of it succeeds.

By negative success, I do not mean deciding not to do a library blog because lots of other blogs haven't achieved loads of community buyin. If your library has some reason to try a blog, even if it might not be a wild success, failure to try it is fear of uncertainty. Try it: You really have very little to lose.

No, I mean cases where there's a lot to lose and the project itself requires a massive commitment of resources. In those cases, it's worth doing some clear long-term analysis; sometimes, you find that the project is inherently doomed to failure, at least the way it's currently designed.

Can I provide examples? Not really. Even for organizations that no longer exist, the veil of secrecy is sometimes appropriate. I can say this: Negative success is only a good thing when it truly avoids predictable disaster--e.g., not adding a new startup routine to your personal computer when, with some thought and analysis, you can see that the routine will send your computer into an infinite loop, leaving no resources to do any other work and not allowing you to back it out.

We're unlikely to share examples of negative success. But we can--we should--be able to share examples of ordinary "failure"--things that didn't go as well as you would have liked or even had to be shut down. If those failures are clearly and honestly described, we can learn a lot from them. That, of course, makes them successes of a sort.

Over to you

Alan Kirk Gray suggested a Library Failures Wiki in September 2006. He repeated the suggestion at Computers in Libraries 2007.

There is no such wiki. Until today, there wasn't even a "failures" page in the Library Success wiki. I guess that's an indication of just how hard it is for us to share failure stories.

But you're all leaders here, or expect to be some day. Leaders learn from failure. Can you share them?

Oh, and if you have a story you're willing to share but really can't attach your name to it--well, send it to me with appropriate explanation. I'll add it here (and, if appropriate, at the Library Success wiki) as an anonymous contribution. That's less helpful, of course--you can hardly provide links to show the nature of a "partial success"--but it's better than nothing. Added October 15, 2008: It's not just major failures we can learn from. We can also learn from mistakes--those things we all make but most of us avoid talking about. Jenica Rogers-Urbanek provides an insightful commentary on the desirability of talking about mistakes.

Significant events (Jenica Rogers-Urbanek)

By Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, excerpted and adapted from this October 15, 2008 post at Attempting elegance. Used by permission.

We just had our monthly staff meeting, followed by our monthly “Someone must be having a birthday” excuse to sit around and eat cake, drink coffee, and chat with each other.

During the chatting and eating cake portion, the group of coworkers I was sitting with started telling stories about the things they’ve messed up in their years of professional work. We were discussing how with some student workers it’s easier to train them after they’ve made one big mistake. Once they understand that their actions have consequences but that they’re reasonable consequences, and that screwing up is bad but not fatal, they’re sometimes easier to work with. They calm down a little and relax a bit. Once we were on the topic, though… It turns out that in our shared drive we have a folder called “Significant Events,” so designated as the place to record the crazy “OMG I can’t believe I did that…” things that sometimes happen and the fallout therefrom, so people have a place to look to get background on some truly odd quirks in our systems and policies.

Beware global functions

The prime mover in that folder is the time someone accidentally renewed all the books currently on loan, followed closely by the time someone accidentally renewed all books due on a particular Thursday. Beware the Global functions of your ILS! The laughing discussion of these mistakes led to other people admitting other “oops!” moments, ranging from humorous typing errors on cards in the days of manual data entry, to the ubiquitous “reply rather than forward” email mistake (”Ah! Get it back! I need that back! AH!”), to the advent of the email-auto-fill address function leading to sending things to the “Staff” rather than one person whose name starts with S, to accidentally inviting an entire school of the institution to a meeting using a calendaring program.

We all make them...

The message I’m hoping to convey with that laundry list is not that making mistakes is okay, or that my colleagues are particularly mistake-prone. Neither is true. Mistakes are still problems that have to be rectified, and we were all, under our laughter, fully aware of the consequences, both short and long-term, of all of the above. The message I’m hoping to convey is that everyone makes mistakes. We just don’t talk about them.

I’ll bet there are other libraries where a staff member has accidentally renewed, checked in or otherwise modified the circulation or patron record of things that were never intended to be modified. I know there are other people who have sent emails to places they weren’t intended to go. I’m certain other people and other institutions have sent out mailings with typos, inappropriate content and other mistakes. I know that other libraries have posted bad information unintentionally. I know that other people have saved a bad copy over good, or deleted the good, or lost the file or otherwise been forced to start over. And on, and on, etcetera.

We all make mistakes. We just don’t talk about them.

...so why not talk about them?

And the thing is, talking about mistakes we make doesn’t diminish them or us. It makes us part of a community of people--some online, some eating cake, all trading stories--who live in the real world, who interact with it in real ways and who sometimes create Significant Events. We can learn from each other. We can learn to put ourselves and our successes and failures into a context that’s meaningful. We can learn tactics for coping with our mistakes. We can learn to be better professionals.

But only if we talk about everything that makes us who we are. Keeping pieces back means we’re limiting ourselves and our dialogue.

From the comments

  • T. Scott Plutchak notes, in part: Several years ago I was chatting with a colleague who runs the hospital branch library of a major university medical center. She was telling me about some really amazing things that she was doing, and doing so in her usual self-deprecating manner. When I told her that I thought she’d found some real solutions to issues that seemed to be eluding people in similar situations in other places, she expressed amazement, saying that whenever she went to conferences and heard about all the great things that other people were doing it made her feel terribly inadequate. I had an epiphany and, only half-jokingly, said that was her problem—-she went to conferences and listened to the presentations. When I went to conferences I hung out in the bar with other library directors where we moaned about all of the problems and disasters and failures we were experiencing in our libraries... It made me wish that we could have sessions at conferences where people did presentations about their disasters--rather than “how I did it good” we should hear about “how I completely screwed things up and wasted a bunch of time and money--but survived and even learned a few things.” But I don’t think that’ll happen.
  • Editor's note: The Learning from failure page on the Library Success wiki went live on March 28, 2008. As I update this article on November 19, 2008, the total number of failures discussed on that page continues to be zero. It's hard to argue with T. Scott's final sentence...

Failure is always an option

Daniel Chudnov uses that title for his "Libraries in computers" column in the November/December 2008 Computers in Libraries. A few excerpts from that article (not currently available on the open web):

A friend reminded me recently about how so many things go right for most of us most days, but we still obsess over the little things that go wrong... For this friend, his outlook changed one day when he chose to focus more on the successes--which isn't to say that he doesn't get upset when things go wrong, but rather that when he does get upset, he remembers what went right to help him get through it.
That's one way to face failure, and it probably can work a lot of the time for the little failures we face every day...
Plan for little failures, learn from big ones. That's the thing about the little failures...you learn what to do about it, and you develop a backup plan... In a lot of ways, this is what becoming an experienced professional is all about...
The bigger failures are the ones that really test us... It's easy enough to say how to avoid these things in the future...but that doesn't mean these things won't happen again...
The scientific method is a great example of taking the process of learning from failure to heart. It's designed to add knowledge whether or not an experiment succeeds...
Indeed, negative findings are so important that many scientists have recognized that there's actually a bias in the literature toward positive findings...

Chudnov then remembers the Library Success wiki and wonders whether there is a similar Library Failures wiki. He didn't find one, but did find this article and the idea.

Although I failed at being the first to suggest it, I hope I succeeded in encouraging you to take a closer look at how we fail and to be willing to share what you've learned when things go wrong. With so many things failing around us and in front of us, it's going to take a lot of failure stories before we figure out all the new ways we can succeed.

Editor's note: Other than recommending Chudnov's full article in print form, I'd like to emphasize the importance of reporting failures--the extent to which failing to do so compromises our attempts at overall improvement. And yet, well, it's been eight months now, and nobody's added anything to the Learning from failure page on the Library Success wiki.

Failing to bridge from use to support (Jamie LaRue)

excerpted and adapted from this July 24, 2008 post at myliblog

For the past decade or so, I have been operating under a specific hypothesis: growing library use, library market share, also grows support. Two strong bits of evidence seem to have disproven that. First, despite a 93% satisfaction rate by our public with our services, despite a solid 80% of county households with at least one active library card, we lost last year's election by 1% of the vote. Second, OCLC's From Awareness to Funding report, based on its 8,000 interviews, concluded that there was no relationship between use and willingness to provide or increase financial support. Nor was it demographic. It was, instead, attitudinal.

Marketing for support, not just use

It took us at least two years to work out how to do an effective PR campaign to grow use. It's just possible that we have to radically rethink our PR to grow support. And that might take another 2-4 years.

The strategy I have followed as director has been very forthright: measuring market share, measuring use, makes sure that we serve as many of our constituents as possible. And we've done a very good job of that. That's worth hanging onto from a service perspective.

But the connect between use and funding still isn't clear to many people when it comes to libraries. And finally, an institution that fails to secure the resources it requires to provide the services its community requires is a failure. Library directors are supposed to figure that stuff out.

I remain a fiscal conservative. Our board, our staff, and I, have worked very hard, and with great success, to wring out the last possible benefit of every penny. And the resources we may request in the fall are still very modest: about $30 a year for most households in the county, for which we offer a significant and cost-effective expansion of demonstrably popular services.

My point: there are much larger spuds to fry than our cataloging systems. We have to integrate sustainable resources into the larger library systems if we are to fulfill our mission.

...and learning from failure

excerpted and adapted from this November 6, 2008 post at myliblog

Now to report the results of the library's 2008 mill levy campaign: We lost [by 7,000 votes of some 118,000 cast]...

I find myself surprisingly light-hearted about it. I truly don't think this reveals some secret disgruntlement.... I think it's clear that our community was worried about the economy, and is hunkering down.

It's also clear that when you lose by 7,000 votes, there isn't much you could have done that would have won. The community has spoken...

OCLC's http://www.oclc.org/reports/funding/default.htm From Awareness to Funding] nailed a lot of things. My library is one of the most heavily used in the nation. We know how to grow that. But we have never--except around this past couple of years of elections--focused on demonstrating our value.

Meanwhile, some of the so-called "conservative" voices in our county hammer away on a series of messages: taxes are by definition bad, government is by definition incompetent and not to be trusted, free market capitalism can do no wrong, etc..

Now that the election is over, I find myself feeling liberated. I want to tackle these attitudes, these premises, head on. Because I believe that they are (a) false and (b) truly destructive to our communities.

Obama's election represents a clear repudiation of the policies, foreign and domestic, that led us into so many failures. What most folks haven't yet worked out is that those policies were based on precisely the premises that they still consider axiomatic: e.g. "tax burden." I heard Bob Schaefer (who lost to Udall) say on the radio, "Republicans aren't wrong about these issues." But oh yes they are. The evidence is all around us.

Changing your mind, changing your practices

Ideas are powerful. They have consequences. And if the consequences suck, then you need new ideas. You need to change your mind.

So my library needs to revamp its publicity and marketing messages to strengthen our community's understanding of just what we contribute. We need to emphasize not just use, but value--and all year long, not just when we're going to the voters for more money.

We need to raise up advocates for our value within the organization, and recruit and deploy outside advocates.

Finally, we need to call out and clarify the ideas that lead to stronger communities, and directly confront the premises that erode our communities.

I think it sounds like fun.

So we'll launch a new planning process next year to re-imagine our library from the ground up, to live within our means until we have a new and more compelling story to tell our community. That sounds like fun, too. As I told my staff, a yes vote would have meant that we were the number one library in the county in two years. We will still do that; it will just be a little harder and take a little longer.

Related articles and resources

Your turn: Talk about it

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