Scott Adams has long been a hero of mine with his insight into corporate life. One of the things that appealed to me when I first started working at Microsoft years ago was that while I recognized a number of the dysfunctional characters and behaviours from previous roles, but I then couldn’t imagine Dilbert scenarios playing out in Microsoft offices (as Microsoft has grown in size and complexity, maybe the cartoons provoke more than a self-recognizing giggle from time to time these days).

His latest book ‘Stick to Drawing Cartoons, Monkey Brains’ publishes a range of his blog posts from recent years which cover a broad range of commentary and reflection. One of the recurring themes in talking about his own experience is the power of embracing failure...

“First, allow me to confess that I have failed at 90 percent of the things I have ever attempted. Failure rarely bothers me. I always learn something in the process, and the screwups provide a nice backdrop of humility for the few times when things work out.”

“To put all of this in context, I remind you again that I fail miserably about ten times for every one success. (That’s an accurate estimate. I’ve literally kept score.) The failures always involved activities for which I was completely unqualified. Ironically, I couldn’t even ‘keep my day job.’ On the other hand, my successes have all been in areas in which I had no obviously relevant background or experience whatsoever. I know that many will say I shouldn’t have written this non-Dilbert book, especially since it isn’t about business. Non-Dilbert books are not my area of expertise. ‘Stick to drawing comics’ is the advice I will hear more times that I care to count. You might be thinking it already. I’m used to it. If I had listened to that sort of advice in the past, I would never have done anything interesting in my life, much less be successful. Was it smart to write this sort of book, or will it turn out to be another in a long list of my failures and embarrassments. Beats me.”

“While I’ve had some notable successes, the vast majority of things I’ve attempted have been flops. But I shake them off and keep on plugging. I always learn something from the flops that helps me later. For example, failing at my corporate career made me a better cartoonist.”

His chapter ‘Lights Out’ tells the tale of doing a ‘keynote speech’ for a big event (which earns him a big fee and is a huge step outside his comfort zone) where everything just fell apart:

“I was standing in front of a corporate group, a few minutes into my keynote address, when the lights went out. The lights returned in a few seconds, but the power surge fried the AV equipment. My professional keynote speech, of which 75 percent involves showing comics and telling stories about them, was dead on arrival. As it became clear to the assembled executives that the equipment wasn’t going to work, they looked at me with what I can only assume was a mixture of pity and ‘glad it’s not me.’ Researchers say that public speaking is one of the great fears in life. But what if you have no speech and you’re already in front of the crowd? That’s gotta be worse. But I didn’t feel fear. I’m not wired in that way. I felt amused. This was something new. I like a challenge.”

He goes on to describe how he made a few quips, turned the session into a Q&A and steered difficult (and boring) questions into more interesting areas. In the end, he concluded “It was the most fun I’ve ever had giving a speech. I feel most alive when things go wrong and routine gives way to emotion. With any luck, something will go wrong today, too. I sure hope so.”

He has a chapter called “Knowing When to Quit” (“Quitting is underrated.”). “So how do you know when to ail out of a losing idea? I heard a useful rule about predicting success during my (failed) attempt at creating a hit Dilbert TV show...If everyone exposed to the product likes it, the product will not succeed...The reason that a product ‘everyone likes’ will fail is because no one ‘loves’ it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10 percent of the consumers have it.”

He also concludes the chapter with, “If you plan to try ten things knowing that nine will fail, it’s a good idea to pursue ventures that won’t kill you if they fail. I prefer challenges where the worst-case scenario is that I’m embarrassed or tired, as opposed to bankrupt or dead. And I prefer challenges where the upside potential is unlimited even if unlikely. But those are personal choices. I find it easy to shrug off failure, so failing 90 percent of the time works for me. Your mileage may vary.”

Finally, “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

Today’s inspiration comes from the more spiritual side where there is plenty of soul food on the banquet table of embracing failure. I heard Salavation Army Editor in Chief Lt Col Charles King on the ‘Pause for Thought’ piece of BBC2 last week (1 hour and 49 minutes into the broadcast if you want to hear it on iPlayer here).

He discusses how ‘accepting’ failure with a courtesy of apology is often not enough. His proposal for ‘making amends’ is really ‘embracing’ the failure and its repercussions and taking responsibility for them rather than dismissing them with a cordial statement. I also like his pragmatic argument that embracing failure with forgiveness has proven health benefits.

“[A book I read] shows an old fashioned Salvationist wearing one of those Salvation Army bonnets that Salvation Army women haven’t worn for thirty years holding a poster that’s been altered to say, ‘We’re wrong.’ The editors used it to illustrate a review of a book on the importance of owning up to your own mistakes and forgiving other peoples’...It declares that simply saying ‘sorry’ is not always enough. It says the word ‘sorry’ is uttered 368 million times a day in the UK...usually as a reflex. But sincerity requires something more specific. For example, ‘I was wrong’. Also, it says, making amends is better than saying ‘I’m sorry’ no matter how grovelling the apology, putting it right is better...Although forgiving the mistakes of other people is hard, research shows it is linked to lower blood pressure and better sleep quality...It is excellent advice for business people, no doubt, and as it happens, all to be found at the heart of Jesus’ teaching in the New Testament. Forgiveness is absolutely a requirement for those who would follow Christ’s example and so too is repentance which is what saying ‘sorry’ is all about.”

Katie Ledger’s just released book, ‘And What Do You Do?’ is a primer to personal entrepreneurship. Building up ‘You’ Incorporated. As explored on many occasions (Secrets from Failure, Don’t Worry Be Crappy, The Alza Moment, Startupfailures.com), ‘entrepreneurship’ is a ripe field for illustrating the upsides of embracing downsides.

The book is constantly highlighting the important of overcoming the fear of failure, understanding ones failures, accepting the inevitability of failure and learning from failure. In fact, one section is entitled ‘Learning from Failures’.

“We prefer to use the word ‘setbacks’ instead of ‘failure’. However, it’s a term commonly used and one that often has dire psychological consequences for people who use it, which is why we’ve put it in inverted commas here. The word ‘failure’ is normally used pejoratively. Rarely can it be used descriptively as almost always it’s someone’s opinion. And almost always what we really mean is that something that we have tried hasn’t worked out. That is the be all and end all of it. Yet sadly we then label the experience as a failure and all too often broaden that out to state that we are a failure. We believe strongly that we wouldn’t get far in life without some things going wrong for us. The challenge is to ensure that we learn from what went wrong.”

More than just accepting bona fide, past failure, Katie promotes actively embracing potential, future failure...

“Whatever your current work status, we would very strongly urge you to think like a freelancer. If you knew your job was being axed in two months’ time, what exactly would you be doing today, tomorrow and the day after that? If you knew you’d be searching for a new job or jobs,how would you go about it? Where would you start?”

She goes on to talk about the opportunities that ‘reinvention’ present. The entertainment world is rife with examples of reinvention – Madonna, Kylie. But I can speak from personal testimony of the power of personal reinvention. My father reinvented himself from an architect to a clergyman becoming an expert in church architecture. My wife, Lori, is in the process of reinventing herself from a classical singer to a vocologist with an eye to becoming a specialist in treating professional voice users. The lesson here is that the field one ‘abandons’ is not a ‘loss’, but rather the foundation to bringing specific and distinctive extra dimension to the new field. One does not have a ‘hopping’ career (hopping from one job to another), but a ‘portfolio’ with each set of experiences expanding and enriching each new venture.

A great read with colourful (in both illustration and language) cartoons from digerati doyen Hugh Macleod.

As Konosue Matsushita is a paragon of Leadership/Management harmony, it is not surprising that his path to that status was filled with a lifetime of embracing failure.

“In a pattern that would be repeated throughout his life, KM turned hardships that often exhaust people into a source of learning and, ultimately, into a driving force behind his subsequent success.”

“He was thrown into poverty at age four, lost one sibling at age five, two more at age six, and was forced to leave his mother at age nine. These events would have unleashed powerful emotions: sadness, anger, humiliation. As his parents helped direct those feelings, he undoubtedly began to dream of a far better future. Those ambitions then helped him to take advantage of the harsh apprenticeship years...At a very young age, he also developed a sense of independence and a willingness to take risks. Perhaps most of all, he learned something about coping with difficult times and benefiting from them.”

“In many ways, the initial phase of KM’s life ended on that day in June of 1917. He graduated from a difficult childhood, an apprenticeship, and the journeyman years, and he moved in a new direction...His life would become even harsher, at least for a while. But that possibility did not deter him much. By this time, Matsushita knew he could handle hardship and grow even stronger as a result. He had been doing just that for nearly two decades.”

“In subsequent speeches and books, Matsushita said repeatedly that he thought economic hard times were good for the company. He clearly believed, from his own experiences earlier in life, that adversity could make one stronger. ‘Workers must submit to many test and difficult discipline before they can be considered mature and trustworthy.’ He wrote in his autobiography. ‘One of the most effective tests of workers’ dedication and resourcefulness is imposed when their company encounters financial difficulties and must pull itself out of a crisis.’“

USA Today interviewed Annie Duke on a topic I have touched on several times here (Harmony and Humility, Embracing Variance), the application of the lessons from poker to the world of business. Her strong finish in Celebrity Apprentice provided a more familiar setting to business problems. Many of the most common insights are about accepting failures that are inevitable...

“Q: You were defeated on the final episode of Celebrity Apprentice by Joan Rivers. Any lessons learned?”

“A: The lesson is that business is not always fair. The person who does the best job doesn’t always get promoted. I worked the hardest, I was the most creative and the best leader. Things are not always fair and I know that from poker. You can put your money in with aces and your opponent has fives. You’re supposed to win 82% of the time, but 18% happens. Poker teaches you that there things you have control over and things you don’t.”

“Q: Business leaders wrestle with playing it safe vs. Taking a risk. How do you decide when to fold or go all-in?”

“A: ...It’s not about being right, it’s about being right often enough...Shrug you shoulders when you are wrong. Great players free themselves from the worry of being wrong.”

My parents have the notion of the ‘18%’ factor with regards to vacations. Their view is that when you are on holiday, you are outside of your familiar area, your routine, your support infrastructure and your flexibility is limited. As a result, what invariably happens is an out off the blue expense that under ‘normal’ circumstances you would consider to be a ‘rip off’. It can often be distressing. The over charged cab fare, the currency exchange miscalculation, the unanticipated surcharge. My parent’s point is that one just has to accept these extra, seemingly very bad luck costs as just part of the vacation experience. You will realise that somewhere along the trip you are going to have to cough up some extra, unanticipated amount. But if you accept these mini-financial failures, you can move on and they won’t ruin your holiday. They call the ‘18%’ – ‘vacation tax’. And whenever an unfortunate extra charge hits them on holiday, they just shrug their shoulders and say, ‘oh well, vacation tax!’ 

Hugh MacLeod has been regular inspiration to insights on especially the ‘embracing failure’ posts here – The Merton Prayer, The Genius and the Showing Up, Crazy, Deranged Fools, Futile Marketing, Changers and Contributors, The ‘Mid’ Life Crisis of the American Dream, The Death of Dreams, Seth Godin “The Dip”.  Much of Hugh MacLeod’s ‘Ignore Everybody’ book carries a sub-text of ‘embracing failure’. He openly shares his own frustrations, obstacles and stumbling blocks and paints them as critical passages on his path to personal satisfaction and other successes. But the chapter that elucidates it perhaps the most explicitly is #13 ‘If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.’

“The pain of making the necessary sacrifices always hurts more than you think it’s going to. I know. It sucks. That being said, doing something seriously creative is one of the most amazing experiences that one can have, in this or any other lifetime. If you can pull it off, you’ll learn many incredible, magical, valuable things. It’s not doing it – when you know full well you had the opportunity – that hurts for more than any failure.”

A song echoing the sentiments of ‘The Race’ itself emerged into the inspirational words concluding the historic Obama victory - ‘Pick Yourself Up’ from the 1936 Fred Astaire film ‘Swing Time’.

In its Obama Inauguration coverage, the Sunday Times noted the allusion in his line “Starting from today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

“Pick yourself up, take a deep breath, dust yourself off
And start all over again, nothing’s impossible I have found
For when my chin is on the ground, I pick myself up
Dust myself up, and start all over again
Don’t lose your confidence if you slip
Be grateful for a pleasant trip, just pick yourself up and dust yourself off
And start all over again,
Work like a soul inspired, til’ the battle of the day is won.
You may be sick and tired, but you’ll be a man my son.
Will you remember the famous men, who had to fall to rise again?
So take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start again.”

Billy Childish pens an article in the Sunday Times called ‘In Praise of Limitation’. Sort of a variant of praising ‘failure’, ie a failure of possibilities.

He speaks from the first hand experience of having lived a rock and roll lifestyle where fame and fortune gave the delusion that life had no limitations and that this was a good thing. Now, having ‘enjoyed’ that supposedly enviable lack of limitations, he has seen starkly how detrimental and painful it is.

Specifically, Childish presents a 12 point ‘manifesto against the cult of hedonism’ which starts with the following three points (which are my favourites)...

1. Limitations are not obstacles, but what help to make us decent, humane human beings.

2. Reality, as opposed to drug-induced idiocy, enables us to meet ourselves and gives traction in an otherwise gluttonous and pointless existence.

3. If you don’t limit yourself, nature will limit your life for you.

We’ve just concluded this year’s commencement season watching and celebrating our daughter Isley’s commencement from Exeter University a week ago. Just a couple of days ago, I capped off her graduation driving down to Exeter to pick up the last of stuff for storage in our garage until she settles into her own place. Like so many of her 2009 vintage, she is struggling to make that step into the labour force and finding the whole transition of constant set-backs and dead-ends especially frustrating after three wonderful years of development, growth, support and ambition.

Back in November, I naturally posted about Obama’s election under the Leadership and Management side of this blog, but he has proven to be just as prescient on the subject of turning adversity to advantage. Thanks to Amber for her post on Obama’s perspectives on failure featuring the characteristically eloquent quote from Obama’s commencement address at the University of Southern New Hampshire. Very apropos words to Isley and her classmates in facing similar challenges...

“Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.”

Congratulations, commiserations and courage to the Class of 2009.

‘Torn’ – My new acronym for “Taking Ones-self Really ‘Npretentiously”.

As I have written several times, one of the core personal qualities to embracing failure is humility (The Merton Prayer, Bill Gates Last Day, Failure is Always an Option, Harmony and Humility, Lousy Teacher). One of my favourite demonstrations of humility is Natalie Imbruglia’s Amnesty International benefit concert appearance to perform her hit song ‘Torn’.

A typical and well done love ballad about sadness and loss that became ‘one of the biggest hits of the nineties.’ As one of her defining and crowning successes, she could have been very precious about it and quite possibly miffed when it because the subject of one of the all-time top Internet parodies – David Armand’s mime rendition (if you were one of the few on the Internet who somehow missed this video, watch it first to get the context). But instead of distancing herself from this complete failure of taking a serious song seriously, she embraced it in a stunning performance for an outstanding cause. The result is as touching and inspiring as it is funny. One of the key mottos of embracing failure is ‘Never take yourself too seriously’ (Benjamin Zander’s Rule #6) and Imbruglia is a poster child for that sentiment.

One of the characteristics that I always admired about Bill Gates was his propensity to never take himself too seriously. As commented on here before, he is quite humble and modest and dressing up in funny costumes and doing silly skits couldn’t be father from his comfort zone, but he does them because he recognises that it can help the business and can bring a smile to people’s faces.

Sometimes a failure is just what one needs on the playing field to inspire greater victory. The ‘wake up call’.

As the rowing season finishes up for the year, this lesson hit home this year with the results of the biggest race of the year by the team of 14 year old girl rowers that I coach for our local school, Sir William Borlase Grammar School.  They are the strongest group I have seen in my 6 years coaching and we all knew they had a real shot at a national medal. They had trained and prepared exceptionally well.  And on the big day, tragedy and horror, within the first half one girl had fallen off her seat and another had caught a boat stopping ‘crab’. Despite great rowing, they were in last place.  That could have been the end of it, but instead the girls got it together and seemed to find guts and determination that they didn’t even know was there to power through a come from behind upset into the Bronze medal third place position. Some cheering fans reflected that if only the mishaps hadn’t happened, they could have finished even higher.  But my fellow coaches and I agreed that the mishaps actually sparked something deep inside them that spurred the truly exceptional performance in the final 500 metres.  Speaking to one of the girls afterwards, she acknowledged that when the mistakes happened, they all just got so mad that they dug deeper than they ever thought possible.

The event evoked my own personal experience with sports failure that ended up in the sports highlight of my life. When I was at Ipswich High School, I played American football. As it happens, our team had been one blessed with an exceptional array of talent. For years as we came up through the grades, everyone thought we would be one of the great teams that my hometown of Ipswich had ever had. When we got to our senior year, we indeed notched up big win after big win, until one cold and wet Saturday we met our arch rivals - Newburyport - who too had a very strong team that year. After a long, arduous battle back and forth, the Newburyport team scored a touchdown that put them 1 point over us in the final minutes. It seemed as if our dreams of not just that day, or even the season, but several years of anticipation had been dashed. However, given the vagaries of tournament maths, it turned out that with the remainder of our season flawless and a few other breaks by other contenders, the grand finale State championship bowl selection turned out to be, yes, Ipswich vs. Newburyport. The final score: Ipswich 54, Newburyport 13. The game was a complete, dominating romp by us. The key? The bone-shaking trauma of our loss a few months before. That failure stirred something powerful inside us to leave absolutely nothing to chance on the big bowl day. 

The spirit of embracing failure is a very humble one and prayer is a quiet concentration of humility. Prayer is also perhaps one of the most common devices people turn to for overcoming adversity. Hugh plugged the following Merton Prayer in a recent tweet and it struck me for the extremity of its humility embracing many incarnations of failure that our lives produce...

“MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

Education, creativity and TED are all rich sources of examples of the positive power of embracing failure. The three come together in Gever Tulley’s description of ‘teaching life lessons through tinkering’ at his ‘Tinkering School’. Here are some of the gems from his presentation...

“Every step in a project is a step closer to sweet success or gleeful calamity.”

“Success is in the doing and failure are celebrated and analyzed as problems become puzzles.”

“When faced with particularly difficult set backs or complications, a really interesting behaviour emerges...Decoration! Decoration of the unfinished project is kind of a conceptual incubation. From these interludes come deep insights and amazing new approaches to solving the problems that had them frustrated just moments ago.”

Embrace failure by tinkering with it and decorating it. 

What do Sarah Palin, Gen. Douglas MacArthur and I have in common?  We all take a sanguine view of new directions.

The headline news of the July 4th weekend was Palin resigning from her position as Governor of Alaska to ‘effect positive change outside government’.  Well, this past week, with less fanfare but not much less surprise among those that know and work with me, I also stepped down from my 15 year tenure at Microsoft with much of a similar rationale.

As those who follow my other blog ‘Dynamic Work’ know, a strong interest of mine is how organisations innovate with work practices and work places to improve efficiency, productivity, satisfaction and carbon footprint. Microsoft has trail blazed in this area with its New World of Work initiative that has centred on how technology supports these workplace innovations. My own role in the UK Server business complemented this initiative both directly with backroom infrastructure and indirectly in architectural parallels. In my new venture, I will focus more directly and exclusively on this area of ‘Dynamic Work.’

What does all this have to do with Gen. Douglas MacArthur? Well, Palin’s speech concluded with a reference to one of his famous quotes which is a fun turn of phrase embracing failure...

“We are not retreating...we are advancing in another direction.”  (minute 6:37 of video above)

In my case, I am leaving Microsoft, but not abandoning its New World of Work vision that I have been promoting for some time now and plan to do so even more earnestly going forward.  This is probably the only time you will ever find me aligning myself to Sarah Palin since I disagree with just about every political stance she has. However, on a personal level and germane to the subject here of embracing adversity, I do applaud her as a consistently powerful, heartfelt and eloquent advocate for the bright sides of parenting a disabled child.  Even her speech yesterday included an upbeat line, “Sure wish folks could ever, ever understand that we ALL could learn so much from someone like Trig - I know he needs me, but I need him even more... what a child can offer to set priorities RIGHT - that time is precious... the world needs more "Trigs", not fewer.” 

In my post ‘The Death of Dreams’, I delved into failure at a deeper, more fundamental level. Hugh recently tweeted Elisabeth Gilbert’s TED speech ‘Nurturing Creativity’.

Gilbert, author of mega-best seller ‘Eat, Pray, Love” talks about the emotional and other challenges of having seen exceptional success and knowing, as I described in my post, ‘this is as good as it gets.’ She describes...

“It’s exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. Jesus, what a thought. That’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 9:00 in the morning and I don’t want to go there. I would prefer to keep doing what I love. And so the question becomes how....The tricky bit comes the next morning for the dancer himself when he wakes up and discovers it’s Tuesday 11:00 am and he is no longer a glimpse of god. He is just an aging mortal with really bad knees and maybe he is never going to ascend to that height again and maybe no one will ever chant God’s name again as he spins and what is he then to do with the rest of his life. This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life.”

Gilbert espouses a coping approach which segregates the exceptional accomplishments of the past from ‘one’s being’ and are thought about as ‘being on loan to you.’ Essentially, she is advocating taking ego out of the mix. First of all, taming the ego itself is as harsh a challenge as anyone will face in life. But, the approach seems similarly applicable to those whose dreams have not materialised in a ‘glimpse of the Gods’, but appear forever out of reach. A big part of the pain here too is the impact on the ego of feeling the failure personally.

Her parting advice is the gem of the speech which provides the truly pragmatic and inspirational direction to how to persevere and thrive regardless of how limited the future appears...

“Don’t be afraid. Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case [referring to a creative muse she talks about earlier], decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts, then ‘Ole’. And if not, then do your dance anyhow. And ‘Ole’ to you nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. ‘Ole to you nonetheless’ just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.”

I started this blog with a poem, but have not ventured into the lyrical explorations of failure since.  Last week, I watched the stunning Bollywood film Devdas (thanks Nina) with a script as richly crafted as its dazzling shots. In an inevitable moment of despair, the courtesan Chandramukhi speaks this lyrical line embracing the adversity (and Bollywood sure knows how to do adversity)...

“If sorrow be joy’s harbinger, every loss signals what gain shall be.”

I finally had a chance to watch some of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by by Microsoft Research Chief Research Scientist Chris Bishop that Steve recommended. Wonderful examples of demonstration and illustration of some quite complex and abstract notions (the best illustration, or should I say ‘portrayal’ of shared secret key encryption that I have ever seen).

One notion popped up in the description of Internet routing was Braess Paradox which showed how the failure in the system can make the system stronger overall. With both a colourful illustration of some road traffic as well as a striking demonstration with a weight suspended by linked bungee chords (minute 25:30 of the webcast which requires ‘buying’ the zero cost webcast, registering, checking out and then watching). In short, Braess Paradox states that in a given network (like a road system or the Internet), the route to take is affected not only by distance but also by congestion.

It is quite understandable that if every driver on the road follows the ‘most favourable’ path for them (without consideration of the impact of their decision on the overall traffic in the area), then there will likely be traffic jams around bottleneck in the most advantageous route. The paradox comes in as traffic can actually be reduced by eliminating roads. One would think that the more road capacity the better, but actually sometimes a road failure can actually increase traffic flow overall and reduce everyone’s journey.

Bishop actually cites a real life example where a tunnel was closed down and traffic actually improved:

“This strange effect can actually happen in real life. In Seoul, in Korea, they closed one of the three tunnels through the city and they actually found traffic flow improved.”

A colourful and curious example of a failure of a rope, road or link making the overall network stronger.

The Washington Post's piece ‘Ever-Changing Virus Challenges Drugmakers’ provides a prominent example of nature turning failure to advantage with the headline grabbing Swine Flu...

“While the flu is unpleasant and potentially deadly, the virus that causes it is an elegant demonstration of a central tenet of Darwinian evolution: The fitness of an organism is tied to its niche. What is superior in one niche can be inferior in another, and vice versa. Natural selection is interested only in what works.”

“The tendency of the flu virus to mutate rapidly stems from its inability to accurately copy itself. But what ought to be a flaw turns out to be a virtue (for the virus): While most mutations lead to dead ends and death, a few variants are successful because human immune systems do not know how to guard against them. In short order, those strains become dominant in the next outbreak.”

"Last year's virus can evade today's immune response," said Peter Palese, an influenza virus expert at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. "We have all been infected with influenza and have a certain immunity, but the virus has changed enough so many of us can get sick again."

While this blog primarily focuses on the practical and pedestrian aspects to embracing failure, one can easily get properly philosophical about the whole concept.  One of my favourite writers, Chet Raymo, explores the interplay of science and religion and gets into some fairly philosophical areas.  His post on the ‘Problem of Good’ entirely echoes the spirit of ‘embracing failure’.  He points out that many religions paint a picture of a deity crafted world which creates the conundrum of how a perfect and good being created so many terrible things...

“I put the book down with that age-old question on my mind -- why do bad things happen to good people? Why cancer for a child? Why beauty at all if beauty is so vulnerable to arbitrary obliteration?  The Problem of Evil, it is called in the long history of philosophy: If God is omniscient, all-powerful, and loving, why are innocents afflicted? The answers to the riddle have been various, and never satisfying.”

Raymo’s solution is to turn the ‘Problem of Evil’ on its head, by instead embracing the concept of Evil (certainly a conceptual sibling to ‘failure’) in the universe...

“Violence and death are the engines of life. To persist, living creatures must take matter and energy from their environment. As life proliferates, competition for resources becomes inevitable. Aggression is advantageous, even necessary. If nature were not cruel (a human concept), conscious creatures such as ourselves would never have evolved. As Loren Eiseley wrote: "Instability lies at the heart of the world."

In Raymo’s eyes, it is only when we embrace the concept of ‘evil’ being alive and core to our universe can we more effectively turn our attentions and energies to a more interesting and productive ‘problem’...the ‘Problem of Good.’

“But our brains are of sufficient complexity to give rise to that mysterious thing known as self-awareness -- and to notions of love and justice. What humans uniquely face is the Problem of Good: How to create on this tiny planet an oasis of peace. Food for the hungry. A cure for cancer. An end to intraspecies violence. Solicitous stewardship of the planet.”

Steve Clayton’s post on the book ‘Showing up for Life’ by the father of Bill Gates...Bill Gate Snr. alludes to the edifying adversities of running afoul of the ‘demo gods’ (not demi gods).

“It’s a good lesson for geeks out there…not matter how much you prepare, the demo Gods have to be shining on you. When they don’t, it’s not the end of the world…as shown by one Chris Capossela with one of the worlds most famous demo failures of Windows 98. I remember thinking at the time “uh oh…he’s toast”….turns out he did okay afterwards.”

If you want to see the Capossela (now Senior Vice President for products like Office, Exchange and Sharepoint) ‘toast’ moment, check out the video above.

For a perspective behind the scenes of when the Billg demos do go all wrong, check out my earlier post ‘Unavoidable Pain’.