Narrating failure in academia: how to turn trash into treasure

Failure is an important part of academia, because it is an important part of the journey of discovery of new knowledge. The only way to not make a mistake is to never try anything, my mother used to say. Or, to put it another way, former US president Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 praised the person “in the arena”, trying, by saying that “credit belongs to the [person] who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming”. I believe we should each strive to be the one in the arena and tell that story as a worthwhile tale of grit, rather than something we edit out of our biographies.

Failure lives with us; we just choose not to highlight it. We narrate our lives editing failure out, so we come across as a success story. To use a social media analogy, we focus on the perfect filtered picture posted on the website and never really pay attention to, or wilfully ignore, the many pictures that did not make the cut.

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After all, there are too many incentives not to engage with failure head on. Exceptions are refreshing, and especially important, but not everyone can afford (for professional, personal or psychological reasons) to admit failure for the sake of admitting failure. But I believe that, instead of hiding from failure in shame and despair, and on the way to normalising it, we should learn how to better narrate it.

There is a lot of pedagogical power to narrating failure. To the extent that advances in knowledge are never individual, and always collaborative, it is important to know where things have gone wrong, for at least two reasons. First, obviously, is so that others working on a similar problem do not go down those paths. Second, and perhaps most importantly, is because our failure in one thing does not always mean a dead end. It is my dead end for my research problem, but it can trigger thinking and contribute to a solution elsewhere. Lateral and cross-disciplinary thinking are essential to solving complex problems, and our failures in one context might be groundbreaking treasure elsewhere.

Further, a failure is essentially just an opportunity for growth. It prompts us to think beyond the grooves of our disciplinary path dependencies and to think outside or even against the proverbial box. So, how about we narrate failure as the opportunity it actually is? Failure not as an end but as a fresh start, a way to do the reimagining that we are convinced success looks like, but that somehow we train ourselves to believe manifests out of thin air? I believe we can and should go down this path.

The risk with narrating failure differently, of course, is that it starts to veer close to corporate spin (and most of us are rightly wary of the corporatisation of universities, not to mention the jingoism and the spin of grand strategies). But what I am urging is fundamentally different. I do not want us to explain failure away, to hide failure under a cover of “[insert superlative jargon]”. Rather, I want us to narrate failure for what it is: a temporary setback that leads us to rethink where we are going and/or creates an opportunity for an advancement elsewhere.

We also should not narrate failure as a full success elsewhere, in no small part because we cannot control it. But what we can control is what we learned from the failure, what it shows about the problems in our underlying assumptions and how it can open new fields of enquiry. Those things in themselves are important to our collective pursuit of discovery and knowledge; we should not hide from them. Even in competitive, cut-throat environments in parts of academia, I still choose to believe that fundamentally we are in this more for the pursuit of knowledge for society than for our individual glories (if we were in it for the latter – wow, did we choose a profession with the most limited of glories).

So, how can we narrate failure? First, and the hardest sentence to write, is to admit it for what it is – not what we expected, a negative result for the specific question we were asking, us having come down this specific research path as far as we could in its current configuration.

But then, second, we get to frame failure for what it can be. What have we learned from this setback? How does it fit with assumed knowledge in our field, in terms of methodology or substantive outcomes? How does this failure change this assumed knowledge? And is there something in another field that could have helped with or be helped by this failure? Where do we go from here within and beyond our disciplinary fields? Is it for someone else to take on the baton − and, if so, who is that intrepid scholar? Or how can I pick it up again to run a different race?

Answering these questions prompts us to admit to failure but see it not as a dead end. Rather, it is a starting point, for us and/or someone else. It can be pedagogical to ourselves and to others. It is normal, it is important, it is useful.

I thus invite us all to think of and narrate failure differently. It can be formative, transformative and/or a way to see in a different direction. It is worthwhile in itself – for our benefit and that of the society to which we contribute as academics. We just need to allow ourselves to accept all those ideas. And to remember that, at the end of the day, the person in the arena takes the day because they were in the arena, and not because they took a selfie with a victory trophy.

Lucas Lixinski is professor at the Faculty of Law and Justice, UNSW Sydney, Australia.

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