Value in Failure vs. Value in Success

[Michael Corsetto]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Interesting to see that so far, success and failure has been defined by blue banners in this thread.

Agreed.

"Fail Faster" is a motto I use often. Do you think 254 wins on the field because their team never fails? No, they just failed 100 times on their practice field, versus your 10 failures on your practice field. By the time you are at your first event, there's still 90 ways your team could fail that 254 has already identified, corrected for, and moved past.

Failure is a critical component of success. I encourage students to fail as fast as possible. Build faster, test faster, fail in the off season, fail in your prototyping, test auto until it fails, crash your scouting system, etc. Fail as often as you can when it doesn't count to increase your chance of success when it does count.

In an education culture that hinges on having the perfect grades and perfect SAT scores to get into the perfect colleges, I enjoy providing an environment where students are encouraged to test their own hypothesis, challenge their assumptions, and regularly fail. I also enjoy celebrating their victories that come from working through failure (both small and large victories).

-Mike

[rick.oliver]

I encourage you to think about your question differently. I believe that the best quality we, as mentors, can instill in students and each other is a passion for excellence.

“There are many people, particularly in sports, who think that success and excellence are the same thing. They are not the same thing. Excellence is something that is lasting and dependable and largely within a person's control. In contrast, success is perishable and is often outside our control. If you strive for excellence, you will probably be successful eventually. People who put excellence in the first place have the patience to end up with success. An additional burden for the victim of the success mentality is that he is threatened by the success of others and he resents real excellence. In contrast, the person that is fascinated by quality is excited when he sees it in others.”
― Joe Paterno

[sanddrag]

While there is definite value in each style of teaching and learning, I prefer to take an approach where I demonstrate and teach successful methods before allowing students to proceed down a road of failure. In FRC specifically, failure can be disastrous, and there is often limited time in which success cannot be realized after a catastrophic failure. In the workshop, failure can be expensive, and even life-threatening.

A problematic dynamic and culture becomes apparent when failure persists for such a duration and reoccurs so frequently that students begin to accept it as the norm, and never learn the proper way to do things.

If you look at Team 696 pre-2012 and post-2012, you'll see a clear difference. That was the year in which we decided as a team, we are going to do things the right way, and learn how to do things the right way, and teach each other how to do things the right way, and take some sense of pride in our work and hold high standards of quality in everything we do. It has drastically transformed our robots, our students, our lab, and the way we work. Whodathunk?

[Clem1640]

Failure can be a great and valuable learning experience, but this requires a few crucial mindsets and capabilities:

1) Introspection. You must firmly believe that your failure was due to factors (at least in significant part) under your control. Therefore, by doing something different, you might succeed. If you assign your failures to outside agents, then you really cannot productively learn from them.
2) Critical Analysis. Understanding the factors behind your failures, your shortfalls, your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Understand how you might succeed and what changes you might make to your habits / processes to improve your prospects to succeed.
3) The will (and the physical/financial/temporal capability) to change what you do and the way you do it (your processes) in order to succeed.
4) The ability to inspire your team to make the necessary process changes that are needed for success.

I mentor a team which, during my early years of mentoring, was conspicuous for never winning anything. Our robots (and our processes) were bloody awful. This situation was very discouraging; to the point that it was difficult making a case for mentors to stay and sponsors to support us.

Our tipping point came in 2008 (Overdrive), where, frankly, our robot was so bad that it was undrivable. This led us to drastically change the way we worked. We started meeting year-round. We started a summer program to develop basic knowledge; initially to learn how to make competent drive trains; later to drive this competency into other areas. The inspiration for change was clearly failure-driven.

Our initial successes were small ones, but quick (2009, Lunacy): an engineering award; an off-season victory (as 2nd pick). Small successes. But for a team accustomed to never winning anything, these successes were enormously inspiring and reinforced the process changes we had started. We kept up our drive to improve. We still do.

Both Failure and Success can have enormous value, both from a standpoint of learning and inspiration. Much of the value depends upon how you internalize and utilize the experience.

Success, of course, also brings hazard. Of hubris and arrogance. Again, how you use these experiences generally determines the value.

[Rachel Lim]

I'm a student, so I can't really answer the OP's question, but I thought it was interesting so started thinking about it.

For everything below, I'm going to define success in terms of on-field success (i.e. how well a team's robot works). Not necessarily winning the event, but having a competitive robot and the potential to win. Similarly, I define failure not as being a finalist or making a few mistakes at competition, but not being a competitor at all.

Inspiration
We've all heard it: FIRST is about inspiration. For some students, failure will be inspiring. They prefer to just try things out and see from themselves what comes out of it. However, I believe that for most, success will be more so. Telling someone "you can do this" versus "you might be able to do this" sends a stronger message. It really varies by person though--I have friends on all sides of this issue.

But I think there is a danger with failure. If you're successful, at worst students will be indifferent. If you're not, they might learn that "this is hard" or "I can't do this" and no longer want to go into engineering / STEM / etc.

There's also the possibility of a greater impact with success. Successful teams have the power to inspire not only their own students, but students around the world. I've been pushed by what I've designed and built to do better next time, but seeing other teams' robots has inspired me more than anything else, and given me a goal to push towards.

There is definitely a power in failure. I just don't think competition is the place to do so. And not to the extent that I've defined it as. Learning from mistakes, testing out ideas that don't work, and "failing" during prototyping is great. Just keep it all in context. Failure as a motivation to do better helps; failure as an end does not.

Learning
I think the question was more focused on whether you learn more from success or failure. Again, I think it's both. If you never lose, you never learn why you need to try hard. If you never win, you never learn why you are trying hard.

For more specific lessons, such as the original example about developing a strategy, I think the lessons will be more ingrained if they come from failure. A couple of friends and I came up with a list of "things we are never putting on our robot again." (Mainly rope, especially when used to move stuff.) Had we not used them in the first place, and just been told it wouldn't work, we might never have understood why not to. But the lesson came with a price. Here it was just that we had to deal with rope for one season. It could have been much more, and seriously affected points above.

This may not be the best example because the rope wasn't something we were warned against, but the only solution anyone could come up with. There were mentors who helped with it.

I believe the strongest lesson a mentor can teach is how to succeed. It can come by guiding students through the process, letting them experiment themselves, or some combination of the two. It will really depend on the team, and what the mentors / students believe.

In the end
I think I've rambled on enough...in the end, what I'd say is to show students how to succeed, but make sure they understand why. Use the offseason and prototyping as a time to try out all sorts of ideas and see what does and doesn't work. Don't let it come at the price of failure at competition, but that doesn't mean to not experiment.

And it'd vary by teams. What mentors are / are not able or willing to do, what students want / don't want to do, and everything else. The best balance is what both groups compromise on and believe is best for the team as a whole.

Random thoughts

Originally Posted by Ginger Power

Meanwhile many other teams who resent mentor-built-robots [...]

This is an interesting point. There are many people who don't believe in mentor-run, but who are fine with other teams doing whatever they think is best. (i.e. "you inspire your way.") I've always believed that people who actually resent mentor-built robots / mentor-run teams are those who are jealous of their success or frustrated with their own failure. I guess that's another danger of failing: putting down those who are more successful in order to make yourself feel better. It's another lesson I think mentors should be teaching students: how to avoid that thinking, and how to cope with failure because at some point, everyone will experience it.

(I'm not trying to get into a mentor-run/built debate; I just wanted to respond to that.)


Wow, that was long...

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by Rachel Lim

Inspiration
We've all heard it: FIRST is about inspiration. For some students, failure will be inspiring. They prefer to just try things out and see from themselves what comes out of it. However, I believe that for most, success will be more so. Telling someone "you can do this" versus "you might be able to do this" sends a stronger message. It really varies by person though--I have friends on all sides of this issue.

But I think there is a danger with failure. If you're successful, at worst students will be indifferent. If you're not, they might learn that "this is hard" or "I can't do this" and no longer want to go into engineering / STEM / etc.

There's also the possibility of a greater impact with success. Successful teams have the power to inspire not only their own students, but students around the world. I've been pushed by what I've designed and built to do better next time, but seeing other teams' robots has inspired me more than anything else, and given me a goal to push towards.

There is definitely a power in failure. I just don't think competition is the place to do so. And not to the extent that I've defined it as. Learning from mistakes, testing out ideas that don't work, and "failing" during prototyping is great. Just keep it all in context. Failure as a motivation to do better helps; failure as an end does not.

Learning
I think the question was more focused on whether you learn more from success or failure. Again, I think it's both. If you never lose, you never learn why you need to try hard. If you never win, you never learn why you are trying hard.

For more specific lessons, such as the original example about developing a strategy, I think the lessons will be more ingrained if they come from failure. A couple of friends and I came up with a list of "things we are never putting on our robot again." (Mainly rope, especially when used to move stuff.) Had we not used them in the first place, and just been told it wouldn't work, we might never have understood why not to. But the lesson came with a price. Here it was just that we had to deal with rope for one season. It could have been much more, and seriously affected points above.

This may not be the best example because the rope wasn't something we were warned against, but the only solution anyone could come up with. There were mentors who helped with it.

I believe the strongest lesson a mentor can teach is how to succeed. It can come by guiding students through the process, letting them experiment themselves, or some combination of the two. It will really depend on the team, and what the mentors / students believe.

This is the core of a discussion my team has been having regarding our direction: Education vs Inspiration.

My opinion has been that teams that succeed are generally better at inspiration than those who don't, and if the goal of a team is to inspire, then it should be the goal to succeed even if success is sometimes at the expense of some education.

Consequently, it could perhaps be argued that students on a team that has their robots parts built by their sponsor and assembled by their mentors don't learn as much about the process, but if that robot is successful, aren't those students more likely to pursue STEM than students on a team whose robot was not successful?

I don't think there is too much unique about the technical skills used to build a FIRST robot that you couldn't learn how to do it at the college level, but if you don't choose to pursue a STEM field in the first place, what is the point of learning the skills at all?

[IKE]

I am a firm believer in the high value of Success after failure.

All too often the "learn more from failure" seems like the nice thing to say after something pretty bad goes on. From a value perspective, I would actually say, that you learn more from 1 success than 1 failure. IE, if I try something that works, I have found something that works (which is valuable piece of knowledge). If I try only one thing that fails, then I only know that one failure point.
Now, if I get the chance to dig in, and learn why something failed, and then turn it into a success... that has a lot of value in my mind.

Of course, learning how to "do soemthing the right way" that leads to success... that can be priceless.

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by IKE

I am a firm believer in the high value of Success after failure.

All too often the "learn more from failure" seems like the nice thing to say after something pretty bad goes on. From a value perspective, I would actually say, that you learn more from 1 success than 1 failure. IE, if I try something that works, I have found something that works (which is valuable piece of knowledge). If I try only one thing that fails, then I only know that one failure point.
Now, if I get the chance to dig in, and learn why something failed, and then turn it into a success... that has a lot of value in my mind.

Of course, learning how to "do soemthing the right way" that leads to success... that can be priceless.

For some reason your post made me think of something that popped up on my Facebook news feed a while ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...m-solving.html

I recommend giving it a try before reading on, or the whole thing will be spoiled

Basically, it deals with a question of confirmation bias. In trying to find out the rule the number sequence follows, a surprisingly large number of people will only out in sequences they think follow the rule - get a bunch of "yes" and your assumption at least fits the rule, although it may not match the rule.

For me, I went almost the exact opposite when I tried it - I tried to get failures. I put in number sequences specifically to rule out possibilities, and the more failures I got the more I knew about the parameters of the rule.

Taking this to the team... Failure and iteration can help you to explore many different paths and define the full parameters of success for a robot. Building something that happens to be successful right off the bat is nice, but can lead to more narrow thinking about what success looks like, as you haven't tried other things that went in other directions.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by IKE

From a value perspective, I would actually say, that you learn more from 1 success than 1 failure.

I agree with this. Any non-trivial real-world problem has a much larger space of non-solutions than it has solutions. This is why we apply our knowledge about science and engineering - to test promising solutions early on in hope of a success, so we can better characterize our problem to come up with the next potential solution, and so on.

To have any hope of understanding any reasonable complex problem domain, you need to experience both successes and failures. Without (repeatedly, constantly) experiencing both, you'll never understand what the difference is. This goes for engineering and non-engineering problems (e.g. "life").

Given how integral finding success is to understanding complex problem domains (and therefore inspiration), I never intentionally "let students fail" in FRC. There will inevitably be enough unintentional failure in any endeavor we take on that adding intentional failure on top of that seems unnecessary.

[IKE]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

...snip...

Given how integral finding success is to understanding complex problem domains (and therefore inspiration), I never intentionally "let students fail" in FRC. There will inevitably be enough unintentional failure in any endeavor we take on that adding intentional failure on top of that seems unnecessary.

I have worked with a few "over-confident" students and let them intentionally fail (in a safe manner, and in time that corrections could be made) in order to do a bit of an ego check. This was actually a good thing (as far as I can tell) for them, and we got to a working solution later on.

I also have intentionally let students do something I thought would fail... but it turns out worked pretty well.

During 2011, I ate a nice piece of crow when one of the students talked about using magnetic arms to latch onto the pole. I said, "any solution that requires magnets is likely as sound as using hope as a strategy" (or somethign to that effect). We had a magnetic runner/clinger wheel 2 weeks later, and eventually had the non-contact magnet and ramp design by end of season.... The kids really should have heckled me more about that one.