Welcome to The Design Loft! (The near Halloween Edition)
Failure is both a core part of design and creative work and a distraction from creating impact. In this issue of The Design Loft, we are going to look at work that has come to play an outsized role in how we innovate, create, and try new things — and what we can learn through it.
Failure is a word that brings up many emotions and memories. For many of us, failure is associated with shame, disappointment, embarrassment, and fear of status upset (see Carol Dweck’s research on Mindsets and Rita McGrath’s work on organizational failure for more on how people experience failure in creative work - references below). For some, it’s something to be celebrated and embraced.
Failure brings with it a lot of psychological baggage, misconceptions, and myths. Let’s explore these in the context of making, innovating, and design.
Failure and Making
Firstly, let’s get clear about what we’re talking about. Failure is defined largely as (see Mirriam-Webster) an “inability to perform”, while others define it as “a lack of success”. The Oxford English Dictionary adds: “The neglect or omission of expected or required action” Or “The action or state of not functioning”.
In psychological contexts, failure can be defined as “An inability to perform an act or to achieve a goal”
Yet, to be unsuccessful, you need to know what success is. When we are innovating -- creating something new -- we may not know what success looks like. Or, that criteria might be very loose and dynamic.
So if the aim is to discover, then failure only takes place when we stop discovering. In a quote attributed to Thomas Edison, he is alleged to have said this when asked about his failures to produce a sustainable electric lightbulb:
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Failure and Learning
There’s a misleading and widely shared sentiment that failure is the best teacher. This is both wrong and enormously simplistic. The evidence is clear that we learn as much or more from success than we do from failure. What is also true is that the lessons we can from failure have the potential to be more emotionally charged, and therefore memorable — but is it a good teacher?
Research by Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach (2019) found that people learn significantly less from failure than from success. Across five experiments with over 1,600 participants, those who received failure feedback performed 21% worse on follow-up tests compared to those who received success feedback—even though both groups received identical information. The researchers discovered that failure is ego-threatening, causing people to psychologically “tune out” and stop paying attention, whereas success keeps people engaged and motivated to learn.
The authors have made the case that learning from failure is actually far more difficult than learning from success. The emotional charge and ‘ego-threat’ of failure, particularly when done in the presence of others, is a high barrier to overcome, which is why failure is actually a poor teacher.
We learn by what we pay attention to, reflect on, and process through our knowledge and experience. The safer we are (or feel) when we do this, the more we are likely to learn. Salience and intensity of experience mediate that. For example, intentionally sticking your hand on a hot stove is something I can say, firsthand, that is a lesson learned simply and once. (And painfully).
Yet, there are many lessons that I’ve been taught many times over from failure and, still fail to learn from. It’s not just about success or failure, but how we learn with both of them.
Learning With Failure
When failure is seen as a threat or source of criticism, it will be hard to learn from it. Yet, failure is also a big part of what it means to create and innovate. Every step from our perception of problems, research, idea generation, prototyping and finishing is filled with moments where success is elusive or unclear (and, thus, failure).
So how do we work with failure to learn from it, safely, and supportively? Celebrating failure is one way, but I’d argue it’s a poor choice. Programs that embrace failure often neglect the stakes involved; it’s not that we can’t celebrate failure, but nor can we universally assume we know how it will be received.
Among the most effective ways to deal with failure in the context of making is to frame it as part of a learning journey. In any craft, we learn through practice. Practice is a repeated, disciplined way of integrating what we know with what we do. When we incorporate feedback systematically and with reflection, this can be called praxis.
This was at the core of the work I did with The Silwood Group as part of our efforts to integrate systems thinking, research, and evaluation to support the design of conservation strategies. Praxis was at the heart of how we integrated these ideas together and were able to learn, reflect, and act on complex issues.
Whether it is conservation strategy, product development or a strategic design of a health promotion program, the ways we approach failure and learning shapes what we make and what we can make.
How do we do it? The ways we learn in design are to 1) pay attention, 2) document, 3) reflect, 4) integrate, 5) adapt, and 6) act.
The key is to make this is establishing a practice. Next, we’ll look at some steps you can take to build that practice in your work.
Learning Through Creation: Embracing Failure in Design
1. Pay Attention. Notice what happens during the creative process—both the unexpected successes and the moments when things don’t work as planned. Cultivate curiosity about failure by observing the gap between intention and outcome without immediate judgment.
2. Document. Capture your failures alongside your successes through sketches, photos, notes, or prototypes. Create a record that treats “failed” experiments as valuable data rather than mistakes to be hidden or forgotten.
3. Reflect. Ask why something didn’t work and what assumptions were challenged. Use failure as a prompt for deeper questioning: What did this attempt reveal about the problem, materials, users, or your own thinking?
4. Integrate. Connect insights from failure to your broader design knowledge and pattern recognition. Recognize that failed experiments often teach you what successful ones cannot—revealing constraints, edge cases, and hidden assumptions.
5. Adapt. Modify your approach based on what failure revealed, treating each iteration as a refinement rather than a restart. Reframe failure as redirection: it shows you where to pivot, what to change, or what new questions to ask.
6. Act: Move forward with informed experimentation, creating new prototypes that build on failure’s lessons. Embrace a cycle where creation, failure, and learning fuel continuous action rather than paralysis.
This entire process, while simple, is predicated on creating psychological safety, a learning culture, and the space within projects to learn as you go. This means relying less on automation (e.g., AI-driven content generation and data tools) and more on sensemaking and discussion. It involves slowing down, sharing ideas, and a culture of dialogue around making in your work.
While this is not an anti-AI strategy, it is one that is more rooted in people and practices, than on tools.
Good luck and good practice! Thanks for reading
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References:
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2019). Not learning from failure—The greatest failure of all. Psychological Science, 30(12), 1733–1744. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619881133
Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2022). You Think Failure Is Hard? So Is Learning From It. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1511-1524. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211059817
Knight, A. T., Cook, C. N., Redford, K. H., Biggs, D., Romero, C., Ortega-Argueta, A., Norman, C. D., Parsons, B., Reynolds, M., Eoyang, G., & Keene, M. (2019). Improving conservation practice with principles and tools from systems thinking and evaluation. Sustainability Science, 14(6), 1531-1548. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00676-x
McGrath, R. G. (2011). Failing by design. Harvard Business Review, 89(4), 76-83.
McGrath, R. G. (2013). The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business. Harvard Business Review Press.