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Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder and inventor of the Z-buffer, has a great take on mistakes and failure in his book Creativity, Inc. Here's a pretty decent summary:

• BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  > Secondly, failure averse cultures don't actually prevent failures, and they have a tendency to squash innovation. Celebrating failure and being failure averse have nothing to do with each other other than celebrating failure means you're probably not failure averse (but I would argue you lack empathy for the people you just lost money for and for the people you just lost jobs for).
• geofft 10y ago
  Having a culture where failure is okay is different from having a culture where failure is valued. Like the parent commenter said, if failure means you look back at what happened, learn some lessons, do better next time, then that's fine, you've gotten value out of failure. If you say "Hey, I got a failure out of the way," you're playing slots and falling victim to the gambler's fallacy. > Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. > Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). So, was this mistake glorious, amazing, or new?
  • hinkley 10y ago
    David Anderson (kanban) once observed that if your estimates are accurate then they should be wrong about half the time (and half of those overestimated). The pressure to make them into promises instead of estimates is, I think, a form of failure aversion, one that Almost everyone deals with and one that causes a lot of unnecessary drama. I don't remember whose quote this is, but the old line about how if you aren't failing from time to time it means you aren't trying hard enough. Your reach can't exceed your grasp if you don't reach at all. However its easy to fail from sheer stupidity as well. Failure is a trapping of success, not an indicator.
• cookiecaper 10y ago
  I read the whole book, let me put Catmull's quotes in context. They're not really generalized startup/life advice; Creativity Inc. is targeted toward people who are already in management and want to improve their department's output. While the root principle that failure is a mile marker, not a road block, on the path to innovation can be extracted, Catmull's book itself is not really about that topic. Rather, it's about how Pixar came to be (recounting major events in company history up to publication, including the spinoff from LucasArts and the death of Steve Jobs), the principles that power Pixar's culture, and how Pixar seeks to instill those principles in its employees. In context, I feel that Catmull is specifically addressing two points when he discusses failure. First, dealing with failure within the ranks of your workforce and second, imbuing upon the workforce a confidence that allows them to be mutually critical without getting hostile. Catmull is a engineer first and foremost, that's what needs to be understood going in. He is taking an engineering approach and applying it to management. IMO, Pixar is an excellent example of what happens when one does that. The first point about not firing people over mistakes or bugs is something that engineers know well, but non-technical people may not understand. A bug, a hole, a mistake, a vulnerability, a typo (like the one that almost deleted Toy Story 2 and could've destroyed Pixar if not for an accidental backup on the home computer of a telecommuting employee) is not a valid firing offense. You need to hire smart people and give them room. That includes acknowledging their humanity, and that the best of us are still going to make simple mistakes sometimes, just because we're human. Even elite runners trip and fall sometimes; practice doesn't make perfect but it makes very good. Dismissing good talent based on the types of simple mistakes that are essentially random events is first, very wasteful of both monetary and talent resources, and second, antithetical to a culture that teaches that mistakes, experimentation, learning, and exploration are not only OK, but necessary parts of doing things that are worthwhile. The second point is more about the employees and developing a culture where they can be comfortable that their image and reputation is not impugned when a colleague expresses his or her honest beliefs about their work product, and vice versa. This is another thing that engineers really value and understand well, but which causes a lot of non-technical people to worry endlessly. Catmull recounts how many people need time to adjust to a culture of free, open, and fair criticism (which makes sense, as many corporate ranks are terrorized by glancing, unstable egomaniacs scattered throughout the ladder) and how Pixar assists them in developing the mutual understanding, trust, and respect that allows them to provide true and honest feedback to one another without becoming bitter. That is, "failure" in one task is a lesson to be learned from, not a fault to be feared, and such "failures" are welcome at Pixar because they understand it is an intrinsic element of exploration and development. Pixar's task is to help its employees internalize these values, so that such open criticism can refine their output into the exceptional pieces of art that they're known for producing. Pixar, via Catmull, is a wonderful example of what happens when a smart, fair, and directly involved leader is allowed to control something he knows well. That's something that happens all too rarely. We'd have many more Pixars if we could get more Catmull-esque people in positions where they could override the drones who go around flashing their MBAs.
• rsync 10y ago
  "Essentially, we're going to fail. It happens. Might as well get it out of the way. Secondly, failure averse cultures don't actually prevent failures, and they have a tendency to squash innovation." That's a very interesting philosophy ... I wonder how that idea, in general, relates to clusters ? I've seen organizations pour lots of time and resources and brain power into chasing nines on their uptime and they all have outages. And those outages are particularly painful due to the complexity that had to be added - complexity that sometimes grows non-linear in relation to the "nines gained". I've always leaned towards building dumb things that failed simply. They're going to fail anyway ...