Looking for Failure (Steve Jackson)

Failures are interesting. They tend to teach lasting personal lessons, but we are loath to share them. These lessons have profound impacts on our habits and viewpoints, but they’re difficult to recount. We need to get comfortable talking about failure. Unfortunately, our brains are wired to screw this up. When confronted with a failure, we are conditioned to ignore it, make ourselves blameless, or create elaborate strategies to avoid the possibility of failure altogether. I’d like to present another alternative: embrace failure. It will happen. That’s ok.

How can we challenge our natural human bias? I’ve spent the last couple years digging into “pop” psychology and thinking about how books like “Thinking Fast and Slow”, “Antifragile”, “Drive”, “Blink”, and “Outliers” apply in a software development environment. I’m most excited about the idea that if we can make failure “safe” then we can use it to learn things that we would otherwise be tempted to avoid and ignore because it might go badly. A focus on failure, both deliberate and accidental, has been beneficial in moving my projects beyond the no defects, 100% test coverage type focus and towards finding innovative ways to detect and quickly reverse failure.