Building a safe space to parade our failures.
“You get an A. You get an A. You all get an A.”
I teach a course called Sports Technology, where I take the grade off the table on day one. I tell the class of 60–80 students, right up front, that they’re all going to get an “A.”
But, there’s a “But.”
The students have to propose, design, prototype, and demonstrate a radical, never-been-seen-on-this-planet-before idea in sports. In 15 weeks.
I tell them my criteria for green-lighting an idea.
One, it needs to sound impossible.
Two, there needs to be a high risk that they won’t succeed.
Three, nobody else has done it before.
Four, there’s a product in there somewhere.
I don’t care what what sport the idea’s for. It can be curling, netball, football, basketball, judo, fencing, running, swimming, skating, skiing, volleyball, chess, videogames. Bring it. It’s all fair game to me.
I don’t care what type of innovation it is. It has to make someone’s life—the fan’s, the referee’s, the player’s, the coach’s, or the team’s life—better. And, I mean better in a measurable, visible, incontrovertible way.
I don’t care what kind of prototype I get to see. It can be all software. It can be all hardware. It can be all data. It can be held together with band-aids, glue, and duct-tape. I’ll take it.
Greenlighting the idea.
Take one. The students trot out their initial ideas.
I respond with, “Seen this, been there, done that. Give me more.”
My reaction is typical at this stage of the game. The students go back to the drawing board. They push themselves to dream up something that does not exist, they go out to interview real users, they do a ton of competitive research, and they search for hard problems.
Take two. Or, maybe three. Let’s even say four. The students bring up outrageously cool ideas. One of my favorites to this day was a tennis-ball-picker-upper project. The idea was beautiful—you don’t want to get distracted while playing tennis, you’re too lazy to pick up the tennis balls strewn around the court, but of course you have the vision and energy to build a robot to vacuum up all the scattered tennis balls and carry them back to you while you play. My reaction was a giddy, gleeful, “Yes, Yes, Yes.” I was all in.
The energy of the greenlighting phase is electric.
The students brim with unjaded optimism as they make glorious campaign promises and dream of wildly successful startups.
I brim with joy at my job. I get to do this for a living.
Just how does one get an “A” in the course?
There’s the direct route. You make awesome promises at the start of the semester, and you deliver said promises in 15 weeks. You get an “A.”
And, then, there’s the more interesting, offbeat way.
You start, you try something, you fail. You shrug it off (it’s your first attempt, after all), you restart, you try again, you fail again. When you meet with me to show me your progress, we’re both staring at a woeful pile of broken bits. You pick yourself up, you keep at it, and you’re suddenly five failed prototypes in, when it all seems futile. You look inside your magic hat and you can’t spot even one tiny rabbit popping out this semester. You re-re-re-re-restart on your sixth prototype, and the semester clock runs out on you.
Welcome to the real world, folks.
With one difference. There’s still a way to get an “A.”
All you need to do is to stand up in front of the classroom, and exhume the corpses from your graveyard of six failed prototypes. You trot out each corpse, talk about it lovingly, you confess what hopes you had, what went wrong, what you tried, why you tried it, and how it all failed miserably. You don’t make excuses. You offer explanations from the depths of your being.
The public celebration of failure is beautiful and cathartic. Corpse after corpse, confession after confession, the emotion in the classroom shifts imperceptibly. A sense of togetherness unfolds. Applause breaks out as the parade of corpses continues during the day. Whistles and high-fives erupt. The audience’s reaction changes the students’ ingrained notion of success. The grander the student’s ambition, the more spectacular their failures, the louder the applause. The students get it—what matters are the ambition of their ideas and the tenacity of their execution. The students feel the glory of their failures. The students feel successful.
I revel in that moment.
To me, the goal of the course was never about polished, finished work. Rather, the goal was to show people to dream big, to dare, to fail exquisitely, and to celebrate it.
We learn more through our failures than our successes. We learn more by daring to fail than by dreading it. Failure is sticky. Its lessons stay with us, and inform us for life. Failure is the true stuff of character. It makes us humble, it makes us human, it makes us empathetic, it makes us relatable to each other. We’ve all failed in some way—it’s the great common thread through us all.
It should be the norm to create a safe space for people to fail, and to label that a true success.
Promoting learning through mistakes.
Applauding the grandeur of ambition.
Celebrating the tenacity of failed attempts.
Trotting out failed creations with pride.
These should be the norm.
Because, when we are safe to fail, we are safe to succeed.
