A sprawling (and hopefully not boring) look at failures across industries and disciplines.

1. The F-Bomb
discussions on failure

2. the faces of failure
a game to get us started

3. "I was out — and very
publicly out. What
had been the focus of
my entire adult life
was gone, and it was
devastating. I was a
very public failure."

4. "I was out — and very
publicly out. What
had been the focus of
my entire adult life
was gone, and it was
devastating. I was a
very public failure."
on getting fired from
Apple

5. “A CEO should take
responsibility. I
screwed up.”

6. “A CEO should take
responsibility. I
screwed up.”
on not responding
quickly enough to
social media

7. “We thought we were
geniuses. We worked
on it for about a year,
but we realized
something that was a
bad sign. We didn’t
like podcasting.”

8. “We thought we were
geniuses. We worked
on it for about a year,
but we realized
something that was a
bad sign. We didn’t
like podcasting.”
on the podcasting
startup Odeo

9. “The way I got here is
through failure. For a
lot of my projects I
should have quit a lot
sooner.”

10. “The way I got here is
through failure. For a
lot of my projects I
should have quit a lot
sooner.”
on a restaurant
startup (circa 1996), a
search engine startup
called 3Apes
(hacked), Nupedia
(paid editor model)

11. “In hindsight, I slid
into arrogance based
upon past success.”

12. “In hindsight, I slid
into arrogance based
upon past success.”
in response to pricing
changes at Netflix in
a letter announcing
the short-lived
Qwikster (double fail)

13. "It is time now for
Californians to unite
behind the common
cause of turning
around this state that
we love."

14. "It is time now for
Californians to unite
behind the common
cause of turning
around this state that
we love."
after losing a 2010 bid
for governor at a
personal cost of $163
million

15. failure and the valley
you hear a lot of this . . .

16. You hear a lot of this

18. failcon, Oct 22, 2012
thefailcon.com/agenda.html
Despair = Suffering - Meaning
How Team Structure and Dynamics
Destroyed Our Product
5 People I Should Have Fired Sooner
My Five Biggest Failures as a Startup CEO

19. cultural advantage?
“. . . in the US, in the San Francisco Bay area,
there is a much higher tolerance of failure.
Failure isn't seen as a fatal event but rather as
a stepping stone or a learning moment for
going on to whatever you do next.”
Mårten Mickos
former CEO of MySQL
sold to Sun Microsystems for $1 Billion

20. considerations
• Who is giving this advice?
• Don't fail where others have failed.
• What are the stakes?
• Know when to move on.
• How is failure measured?

21. reflections on failure
From Bergh's Exhibition '11.
Rei Inamoto, chief creative officer at AKQA
Amy C. Edmondson, Harvard professor
and more . . .

22. designers on failure

23. milton glaser

24. glaser on failure
“The way to professional accomplishment is
you have to demonstrate that you know
something unique that you can repeat over and
over and over, until ultimately you lose interest
in it. The consequence of specialization and
success is that it hurts you. It hurts you because
it doesn't aid in your development. The truth of
the matter is that understanding development
comes from failure.”

25. paula scher

26. scher on failure
“People need to understand the difference
between failure and bad luck. Bad luck is
something else—sometimes you lose your job,
sometimes you're in the middle of a project
and it gets canceled, sometimes you have a
client who's impossible. That's just bad luck.
Failure is when you have the ability to fix it.
It's important to know the difference.”

27. scher on ted
Great design is serious (not solemn)

28. failures of design
name that failure

33. tragic failures

34. air france flight 447
June 1, 2009
216 passengers and 12 aircrew
a malfunction caused the auto-pilot
to disengage
that’s when the problems started

35. flight path

37. Captain Dubois
First Officer Robert
First Officer Bonin

38. transcript
02:12:14 (Robert) What do you think? What
do you think? What should we do?
02:12:15 (Captain) Well, I don't know!
02:13:40 (Robert) Climb... climb... climb...
02:13:40 (Bonin) But I've had the stick back
the whole time!
02:15:67 [ end recording ]

39. if your airplane stalls

40. Boeing airplanes: the control column shakes
to warn the pilot.
On most Airbus: side sticks don’t shake.
Instead, there is a very loud verbal warning
repeated multiple times. Those protections
weren’t in effect because of the inaccurate
airspeed readings.

41. The pilots may have been so distracted that
they forgot to do the one thing they needed
to do to survive: fly the airplane.

42. yerkes-dodson law
Research on stress shows that a little bit of
stress can help you perform a task because it
heightens awareness.
Too much stress, however, degrades
performance.

43. yerkes-dodson law
Research on stress shows that a little bit of
stress can help you perform a task because it
heightens awareness.
Too much stress, however, degrades
performance.

46. cost of failure
A 2000 Institute of Medicine report
estimated that medical errors are estimated
to result in about between 44,000 and 98,000
preventable deaths per year.
Assertion: the problem in medical errors is
not bad people in health care—it is that good
people are working in bad systems that need
to be made safer.

47. 182 plane crashes/year
conservative estimate

48. reason’s swiss cheese
model of human error

49. systems failure
A system can create the conditions for failure.
vimeo.com/44807536
At the 36th St. subway station in Brooklyn,
one of the subway stairs is a little bit higher
than the others.

50. a bad system

51. errors are predictable
performance errors
commission: taking unnecessary additional
steps to complete a task.
ommission: not requiring all the steps in a
task to be completed
wrong-action: taking appropriate action at
the wrong point.

52. fixing failures

55. AIGA top 10 election design guidelines

56. Brief dated August 6, 2001

57. Airbag Industries redesign

58. 20 years of mice

59. iCatch: the retrofit

60. avoiding failure

62. "High dwellings are
the peace and
harmony of our
descendants.
Remember the
calamity of the great
tsunamis. Do not
build any homes
below this point."

63. notable sports failure
Michael Jordan Failure ad

64. meta-failure
Techniques for handling failure as suggested
by disgraced journalist Jonah Lehrer.
wired.com/magazine/2009/12/
fail_accept_defeat/

65. Check Your Assumptions: Ask yourself why
this result feels like a failure. Maybe the
hypothesis failed, not the experiment.
Seek Out the Ignorant: Explaining your work
in simple terms may help you see it clearly.
Encourage Diversity: If everyone working on
a problem speaks the same language, then
everyone has the same set of assumptions.
Beware of Failure-Blindness: It’s normal to
filter info that contradicts our preconceptions.

66. giving in to failure
knowing when (not) to quit

67. The greatest
documentary ever
made on not
admitting to failure.

68. Engineer, Designer,
Inventor, Futurist, etc.
kicked out of Harvard
on two occasions
bankrupt and jobless
at age 32
two years of selfimposed silence

69. “There is no such thing as a failed
experiment, only experiments with
unexpected outcomes.”
R. Buckminster Fuller

70. final considerations
Failure is really about getting information.
Failure is the signal that tells us what is
working and what isn’t.
Understanding failure may be more
important than seeking success.

71. the end