Lowering the Cost of Failure

Shortly after I wrote yesterday's post about the Toy Story 3 team at Pixar, a longtime friend and mentor sent me Mark Rober's TED Talk, "The Super Mario Effect". I'd seen it a while ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I almost archived the message without much thought; but his email made me curious to review it, and I'm glad I did! 

No kidding, less than 3 minutes in, the video completely reinforced Ed Catmull's definition of a healthy creative culture. In it, Rober describes a simple coding activity that 50,000 of his YouTube followers performed with dramatically different results across two different groups, whose game setup featured only one minor difference: 

"In one version, if you hit Run and you weren't successful, you didn't lose any of your starting 200 points... However in the other version, if you failed, we simply took away five no-value-in-the-real-world, no-one-will-ever-see-these, completely meaningless, fake internet points. (Laughter) That minor difference is crucial to keep in mind for the results I'm about to show you from the 50,000 data points we collected. For those who were penalized for failed attempts, their success rate was around 52%. For those who were not penalized, their success rate was 68%. That statistically significant delta of 16% was really surprising and almost seemed too hard to believe until we looked at another piece of data that we collected, which was attempts to solve before finding success... Those who didn't see failing in a negative light took nearly two and a half times more attempts to solve the puzzle. As a result, naturally, they saw more success and therefore learned more. So if you think about that and sort of unpack these results, the trick to learning more and having more success is finding the right way to frame the learning process."

What a great illustration of how the perception of failure - how much failure "costs" someone in terms of reputation, etc - impacts an individual's ability to learn and appetite to persist in the face of challenges. At Pixar, they've learned to value learnings-that-only-come-through-failure so highly that NOT failing is actually perceived as the worse outcome: it means you must not have attempted boldly enough, that you played it safe, etc. So we see that one critical way to reduce the cost of failure is to increase the value of learning: "cost" is relative, after all... 

As my friend Diego Rodriguez often says, "Where's your space for failure?"

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