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What Interests You About the Science of Failure?

Would you tell us about your backgrounds and how you ended up researching failure?

Sandhya Krishnan (SK): I'm a postdoctoral research fellow, and I was lucky enough to receive a National Science Foundation Award to study students' experiences of failure in undergraduate research settings. Learning what students experience as science failure is actually exactly what I do for my day job.

I worked a lot in agriculture with rural communities that bank seeds that are grown in their communities. This is what I continued to do at the Agricultural Research Council, working on Indigenous legume genomics with cannabis, but really focused on using genomics for seeds that are rural-based, not commercial seeds that are purchased. When I was doing this for 15 or 20 years or so, it wasn't called citizen science in my mind. It was just called community engagement or engagement with the community. But as you know, now it's been formalized within the international community as citizen science.

Lisa Corwin (LC): I'm an associate professor, and I'm Sandhya's mentor in this work. I am the PI of what we fondly call the REACH Lab, which is Research and Education for Action and Change. It's a lab within the Ecology and Evolution Biology Department at the University of Colorado (CU), Boulder. In this lab, our primary question centers around what helps students develop into resilient, creative, and community-engaged scientists. So that first part of our mission is really what Sandhya leads in our lab. She leads the research on how we help students develop that resilience. And a big part of that is how students cope with failures, both academic failures and especially failures in their scientific research. As far as what's relevant to this particular podcast is my mentorship of Sandhya in leading that work. Also, my day job involves a lot of failure. Teaching involves a lot of failure. Doing research involves a lot of failure. You go down wrong roads a lot and you have to correct or maybe even abandon that road entirely. That's a lot of what we do on a day-to-day basis. We also focus on action and change within stem education.

Nicole Quinn (NQ): Can you give us a little bit of a background story on what interested you in failure? Was it a personal experience or something you saw in your students?

What first interested you about failure?

SK: It's both personal experiences and what we saw in our students. I never thought I'd end up in education. I worked for 20 years to get into medical school, and I had only ever thought that I would be in medicine. I spent more time in hospitals than I did in classes when I was an undergraduate. I got into medical school. I was in the midst of the career that I wanted. Then I started experiencing failure, and I didn't know how to deal with it. I didn't have any coping mechanisms because I had never experienced it before. In navigating that and then eventually deciding to leave medicine—not quite because of the failures, but because of other things associated with what I was realizing about myself—I left medicine and had to find myself. I didn't know what to do with my life with this new openness that I had, where basically all the career plans that I had, had fallen apart in front of me. I fell accidentally into teaching and fell in love with this idea of how students learn.

For my PhD dissertation work, I became interested in a career path about not only teaching students, but investigating how they learned. In trying to figure out a project for myself, to find the thing that called to me, I was seeing students fail and make decisions around their failure that seemed unproductive or not good for them. Whereas I was seeing other students make really interesting decisions where they would realize they were actually better at one thing rather than another. I became fascinated with the idea of how students make decisions around failure. Before I could study that, I really had to understand what it was that students experience when they fail. This idea—that science as an endeavor progresses through failure—was the philosophy behind my pursuit of answering how science students experience and learn from failure, and what, particularly, they learn about science through failure. So that's how I got into it. From personal experiences, watching students experience failure, and combining the two with my own passion and love of science.

LC: Like Sandhya, [experiencing] failure led me to be interested in failure. In graduate school studying plant ecophysiology, looking at how plants respond to the environment, I did a whole bunch of big, huge greenhouse experiments that took six or seven months to put together. They were very high stakes, and I failed at several of those. That was six months down the drain, and I had not been prepared for the havoc that that would wreak on my emotional state, my well-being, and my confidence in myself as a scientist. There was a real wake-up moment when my paper had gotten rejected from a journal. It was rejected at the editorial stage, like, “Hey, this is not a good article for this particular publication. We're not going to accept it.” And I read that as a complete failure of myself as a scientist. So I tabled that article for a good six or seven months, and then I walked into my advisor's office and he said, “So have you decided where to resubmit that article?” as if nothing had happened.

And I was like, “Wait, that article is horrible, Jim. It's bad. It's awful. It's just a total pile of you know what.” And he was like, “No, it's not. We're just going to put it in a different journal.” It was at that moment that I realized that what I had read as a big failure, he had read as just a little blip. I really took that to heart and that I needed to reframe what I was seeing as failure and also how I handled those small or large failures in my work. I also had an experiment that was entirely decimated by rabbits; it totally failed due to me not putting a fence around it. So there are failures for all sorts of reasons. But unlike Sandhya, I was always interested in education. I was super fascinated by Angela Duckworth and her work on grit and especially the persistence piece of her work. When I discovered during a postdoc that you could do STEM education research, and specifically biology education research, I started looking into the passion side and also the perseverance—the persistence piece, and studying failure in science as a postdoc with Erin Dolan at the University of Georgia.

LC: I kept doing that as a faculty member and then found this wonderful attendee at a conference that Flamenet, a group I’m a part of, hosted. Sandhya was talking about failure not just as something that scientists have to cope with and that scientists need to learn to deal with, but actually as an epistemological experience. So, failure as something that actually leads people to learn more about the disciplines that they're in and as this really positive thing. And that fascinated me. So we've been working together ever since that first meeting where I was just totally fascinated by her dissertation work and what she was saying.

What Helps Build Resilience and Creativity in Scientists?

Daylon James (DJ): I love everything about this subject. I love the destigmatization of it, which I think in large part is what we're doing here. But also I love the symmetry of this mentorship and having you both here on the show because it is almost a trope of science. We all know that science is built on failure. But I don't think we understand it. You have to learn it. You have to experience it. Or at least that's my thinking as someone who feels perhaps a little jaded, maybe a little wiser, although not too wise. When you think about science and progress, you see all the shiny successes. I think the metaphor—to borrow from fantasy geekdom—is the dragon, Smaug, on the pile of riches. But just imagine that underneath that veneer, it's just a bunch of tin copper. That's the way science is, in a way. It's this shiny veneer built on a huge unfathomable failure.

It's all undocumented. As a younger scientist, your entire view is framed by that limited experience of however amount of failures you have. You have no idea how that scales relative to the totality of your own career, much less the march of science. That's what I've taken away, like, “Oh, I get it now. Of course, I'm going to fail nine times out of 10.” That's progress. But how do you convey that to younger scientists? Because there is something a bit demoralizing about that. If you said that to someone, they would say, “Oh, but look at the major league. If you hit three out of 10, you're a winner.” But what if you went and said, “If you hit one out of 10, consider it a success.”? I mean, that's what you're talking about in terms of how you set these younger scientists up for success without demoralizing them.

How do you go about maintaining enthusiasm and optimism, while also bracing younger scientists for the inevitable reality of failure?

SK: There are two parts to this. There is what happens in the classes and what happens in the research settings. We can speak first to what happens in the research settings, because this is also a podcast that really focuses on mentorship. Really, truly, it's all about how you set up mentorship structures, and it is how you set up the lab culture. In a lab setting, when you talk to students, when you create a lab filled with postgraduate students, graduate students, and undergraduate students, some of them are further along in their science trajectory and their understanding of science than others. Some may be brand new and have absolutely no experience with having been in a lab before. So it's what you do in these spaces as a mentor that really shapes the students’ experiences. With my dissertation work, I interviewed undergraduate researchers, and I asked them about their failure experiences, how they made sense of it and what, if anything, they gained from it. Consistently, the language changed through the failure, from them seeing themselves as external—as being almost viewers to the scientific process—to them being on the other side of the space, on the other side of this failure, as participants in the scientific process.

SK: What they started learning was that there was actually a part of science that they hadn't witnessed before, but because of failures, they were able to see the hidden side of science. They saw the background work that goes into developing protocols. They then became part of that work. There was also this emotional component to almost every single interview where, “I was so afraid to come in and tell my mentor this didn't work”. But then the moment they faced that fear, their mentor was like, “Oh, yeah, this happened to me, too, when I was a graduate student or when I was an undergraduate student. That's just fine. This is how we will talk about it in our paper. Now, let's try this.” There was this moment of almost relief that they didn't screw something up for this PI or this graduate student. But then there's also that bridge for them. Them saying, “Yeah, this happened, and it's okay. This is what we are going to do about it, and let's walk through this process together. Let's troubleshoot together.”

Who is key to setting up students for coping with failure?

SK: The mentor was really key to setting up that structure. As Lisa mentioned, in science, sometimes experiments that fail mean months of work down the drain. How do you set that up for your student to say, “It's okay, this happens.” Often, you have to preface it. You have to say it ahead of time. When the student comes in, when you set up a mentoring relationship with them, that is a great time to say, “Let's budget in time for failure.” That's a great time to do that. Then also, when that failure happens, to walk the student through the process, whether that student is an undergrad, graduate student, postdoc. Enable them by setting up structures where postdocs can mentor graduate students through it, and where graduate students can mentor undergraduate students through it. So at each stage, they are both a student and a mentor to somebody else through this process. That way, they really learn and really believe that failure is part of the scientific process.

Why are students so fearful of failure?

LC: Sandhya mentioned the tension between research failure and academic failure, and how students might be really afraid to come tell their mentor that they failed. Our hypothesis, which we haven't fully tested yet, is that fear is coming from the culture of academic failure. When when students fail in an academic setting in a class, such as if they fail a test, or they fail an experiment, or they get a failing grade on something, such as the high-stakes assessments that allow people to get into medical school or advanced programs, those failures are extremely detrimental and they're penalized in academic settings. Students in scientific settings and research settings are going to have fear because of the way that we structure failure in academic settings. Coming back to thinking a little bit about mentorship and also teaching, like Sandhya said, [mentors] have to make sure they start off the conversation with, “Failures happen here.”

We learn from failure. Failure is what scientists build on in order to figure out new things. All of that messaging up front is going to help decrease students' fear of failure because it decreases their shame and embarrassment. I'm actually drawing on a lot of literature about fear of failure here. [Mentors should] decrease students’ shame and embarrassment when they do experience a failure. It decreases their uncertainty around their future. A lot of students fear that if they fail, they're going to get kicked out of a program or kicked out of an experience because that actually does happen in some contexts. Decreasing shame and embarrassment around failure can help decrease those fears for students moving forward. We can do this in teaching as well. In our teaching structures and our big, high-stakes classrooms where students are doing high-stakes exams that might determine whether they get into graduate programs or not, we can structure those differently by having more low-stakes exams and low-stakes assessments before the high-stakes one so that students can fail early and learn from their failures before they get to those high-stakes assessments.

How Do Life Scientists Define Failure?

NQ: I'd like to back up and specifically define failure, because as you're telling these stories and explaining your work, I'm thinking of failure. You told the story about not putting a fence up around your plants. And as a side note, I did my master's with an ecologist who was also named Jim, which is interesting. I saw how in ecology, specifically, you could lose a whole season. When, because of a mistake or because something didn't work out, you only have a couple of years to do a degree, that can be really catastrophic. So I empathize. But back to defining failure; sometimes it is because you made a mistake, a bonehead mistake or an uninformed mistake, whatever it is. Sometimes it's because something went wrong with an experiment that you couldn't have anticipated because nobody had the knowledge ahead of time. That's something you can learn from. But then sometimes it's a failed experiment because you asked the wrong question or, actually, it's not a failed experiment. You just answered a different question.

I'm sure you have many more ways to define this [failure]. But I feel like each of those you have to learn from in different ways. There's more tolerance for some than others. If you're making bonehead mistakes again and again and not learning, you probably aren't going to make it through a program. Maybe that is a whole other learning journey, and you end up in another program or in another life path.

Do you have a definition of what type of failure you research?

LC: For our research, we specifically examine failures in research-based settings more than we do in academic settings. We kept our definition really broad. That definition is when someone fails to complete a task within an achievement context, which basically means that there's this external context agreed upon by the lab group or society or some external force that is defining what success is, and there's certain criteria for success. For example, with a scientific experiment, the criteria might be that you get data that allows you to evaluate your original question or your hypothesis. That may not always happen, right? Because rabbits might eat your plants, or because your data is so messy that you can't interpret it, or because you made a bonehead mistake and loaded the wrong thing in the machine and it messed up all of your data. There's a whole variety of reasons that that might happen. We like to think of failures also as “small f” and “large F”. So the failures that are “small f” might be something that you can go back to, to redo it, and get the data again relatively easily.

“Large F” failures are when there are repeated mistakes time and time again, and it actually leads someone to abandon a research line or maybe even change their career. Those are “large F” failures in our mind. For students, we tend to think that those “small f” failures are things like failing an experiment, not getting a DNA extraction, or even the one that I used about my rabbits eating the plants. That caused a pretty big time sink of six months, but I could go back and redo that experiment. Those are more “small f” because you can go back and you can redo, repeat, or fix those in time. Those failures help us develop the resilience to handle the large failures down the road. All of that resilience is built into how we're approaching the challenge in the first place. So we like to ask, are our students approaching the challenge so that they can learn something new out of it, or are they approaching the challenge to prove to everybody else around them that they're good enough? Those are two different constructs that we look at in our research.

Why do scientists respond so differently to perceived failure?

LC: Oftentimes, the people who are performance oriented need to prove to external people that they are not failures. Those folks are threatened the most by the challenges that they encounter, and they actually respond worse when they fail because it's an existential threat to who they are. Whereas the people who are approaching this with a mastery approach, thinking that they are going to learn something no matter what happens from this experience, they're affected a little less by those failures, and they have a tendency to respond by saying, “Oh, I learned something. Okay, well, let's go back and do that again. That was a bummer. It was awful that it took six months of my time. I'm going to cry a little bit, and then I'm going to move on and learn something.”

SK: What we're realizing is that failure is not a singular event. It is an experience. We can ask, how do students approach this experience? What is the actual experience? How do they respond to it? It's encapsulated, but it is an entire experience, not just a one-off event. I think something that we've also recognized in our work is that it doesn't matter how we define failure; it matters how the people going through it define it. For us, that's students. How do students define failure and how does that determine how they approach it and how they respond to it? That's currently the focus of our work. A particular angle that we're taking right now that is even more specific is, how do the identities that the students come into a space with inform how they see failure?

SK: This comes back to what I said earlier, where when you're thinking about a lab setting, some of the students that come in might not have any experience with having either been in a lab or even a scientific space before. The students whose preconceptions about what the scientific space is and what failure and success looks like; those are the students who might not have ever known that failure is part of the scientific process because they were never exposed to it. So if they are a first-generation student, or they're coming from a community that has not exposed them to science, it really matters when they hit a potential obstacle that for scientists or other students who have exposure to science might say, “Oh, well, that was just part of the learning process.” This student might instead say, “I don't know what happened and I'm so scared that this is how I'm going to be seen; as a failure.” As a person who is a representative of this community, I might be seen as somebody, or I might represent my community in very negative ways in this space by failing. For a mentor it might seem like an overreaction, but to those students, it is true to their lived experience. So really strong mentoring structures and mentoring relationships really matter to support these students in showing them that truly these failures are part of the scientific process, and the failures do not mean that they do not belong in science.

How Do Scientists at Different Career Stages Handle Failure?

DJ: I'm going back to what I said earlier: I feel like I've learned a lot about failure in my experience, and I've observed a lot of failure. I think I do try to preempt and prepare. But I think it's such a tough thing now in the current climate with the general culture of academic science, which I would argue hasn't really changed very much. It's still very elitist, still driven by big names, and really big ideas more than anything. It's the currency. It's the cutting edge using the expensive tech and asking really tough questions at these esteemed institutes. For the most part, that culture hasn't changed. But I think by the same token, at least in my field with stem cell science, there's now this translational wave where there's industry demand for younger talent. I think it's a bit of a challenge because while failure is inevitable, and while you can prepare, and tell a young scientist anything, you also say, “This is not at all the goal. This is not the goal. This is the anti goal. You want to not fail.”

It's just harder now, I think. For me, five years seems like nothing. But for a young person, if over a year or six months you lose an experiment, that's catastrophic. It's just so hard to balance those competing influences and pressures at such a critical phase.

How willingly do more experienced scientists versus early career scientists accept failure?

LC: We do expect that people are going to achieve things. When I've spoken about our work with a variety of different PIs, the response is, “Oh, that is so important. We really need people to understand how to fail and troubleshoot and then keep going. It's always the keep going part. They need to be able to cope with their failures in a way that, not only emotionally, they can move through them and get to the other side.” But also, as Sandhya's work highlights, they need to be able to learn from that failure and then apply it the next time that they engage. This isn't unique to science. When I was initially in this field, most of the literature I was reading was in entrepreneurship and business. There is so much work on how entrepreneurs need to be able to cope with failed businesses. And boy, those are high stakes, right? Millions of dollars. When a business fails, it's done. It's not like you can go back and make it successful again.

SK: I was doing a lot of reading in that space. I believe that we absolutely need to recognize how challenging failures can be for our students. We need to recognize that we can't immediately get over all failures. It's not that we're expecting our students to move through them without emotion. They are frustrating, they are disappointing, they're hard. We need to honor all of those emotions and give students the tools to cope with those emotions and also give students the tools to be able to learn from their failures. To reflect on them in a supported environment where their PIs, their mentors, say, “Okay, this sucks. You failed.” Have their mentors validate their feelings around that failure and then also say, “Okay, this was still a valuable experience in that we can learn something from this.” The literature on coping is very broad. It's all about coping with any stressor, from having a chronic disease to a single instance of failure. But the literature on coping describes how people who are able to troubleshoot, and are able to reflect on what went wrong and figure out why it went wrong, are actually the ones who are likely to go back to that problem again and solve it. We can model those skills, right? We can model how to do that in our labs.

How can scientists learn to cope with failure?

SK: That's a translatable skill. When you learn to troubleshoot in science, when you learn to troubleshoot scientific failures, the learning to troubleshoot often becomes the... I want to say I think it's the coolest outcome from science, because that skill then can be translated across disciplines in all aspects of your life. I think when you can do that in a supported way, you learn far more than if you're unsupported by your mentors. Coming back to whether there’s a difference between young scientists and PIs? I think more deeply, the question is, who has the privilege to fail? Because that is something that's actually come up with our student data set, where students say, “I can't afford to fail because I am already paying for every credit hour that I take.” That's on the academic side, but it translates even into science then. “I feel like I can't afford to fail because I have six more months till the end of my degree.” Or as a young scientist or as an industry scientist, it's like, “I have to get this product out the door by the time that the sales representatives have said to this company that we're going to have it.”

Do they have the same privilege to fail that somebody who is an established, tenured faculty member or who has made it up the ranks in industry that is like, “I can do this science business or this business can fail because I can start another one.” Do they have the same privilege to fail? They don't. But I think it is the folks that have made it that really need to recognize the privileges they had to make it, and then create those structures for people who feel like they don't and who truly don't have that privilege. To fail. And that's why I think Lisa and I are both not really fans of the whole fail forward, fail fast movement. We used to be, but we're recognizing through our research that failure is far more complex a phenomenon when you realize that not everybody has equal access to fail and learn and grow from failure.

LC: I agree exactly with what Sandhya just said. To add one more point: I'm in a wonderful position in my career where I have a lot of privilege to fail. But in that position, and same for people who are in similar positions, I can create low-stakes opportunities where people can fail without any consequence. Those things allow folks to both develop coping skills and learn within the field before the high stakes instances where you really don't want your students to experience failure.

Mentoring Students Through Failure

NQ: I've been thinking a lot about that “small f, big F thing,” and also what mentors can do, and really painfully thinking back on all of the different failures that I encountered and how those were dealt with both by my mentors and by me. Sometimes it meant burying them; literally getting to the end of the lab day, realizing I got no DNA out of my extraction and starting again at 7 p.m. and staying there all night so that the next day my PI didn't realize what happened. Those are the kinds of things that you do. And was that good? Was that bad? I don't know. But I think that what we can do as mentors is tell those stories and have other people that we're mentoring understand that we didn't get this far in our careers by doing everything perfectly, but rather by doing things twice and three times and four times. Learning from failure.

Do you have examples of great mentorship?

NQ: I know storytelling is part of your research and part of what you're doing, so I'd like to hear more about that and how that can help. Have you seen examples of great mentorship? I'm thinking of ideas where perhaps in a lab meeting every week, instead of just a mentor asking, what did you accomplish this week? They also ask, what went sideways? And what did you learn from it? And what are you going to do next? Because I think those are the two pieces that we really have to pull out so that people don't just hide it. So that we can help them learn more and learn how to do things.

SK: I'll tell a little story to start. I think this is something that another mentor of mine and a colleague of Lisa's, Dr. Jennifer Heemstra, has done. In her lab, there was a wall dedicated to failures. It was called the failure graveyard or failure wall. Basically any failures that happened, whether that was a paper rejection or a failed extraction or accidentally breaking a test tube, all went onto Post-it notes on the wall. When the wall was full, the lab would celebrate because the idea was that that wall was a representation that they tried something. Even if it didn't work, they tried something, they were attempting something, they were pushing boundaries. I think this comes back to what got me interested in studying failure in an academic way; this idea that if you read the philosophy of science, it is this idea that what we know has come about through repeated experimentation. When we reach the boundaries of what we know, things start to fail. Experiments start to fail because we're no longer accounting for all the things, or we can't account for all the things that we don't know.

But it's those failures that provide us the opportunity to say, “What is happening here with this data set? These are the things that we know. The rest is potentially something that we don't know, but that we're picking up the artifact of. And so now let's explore this area of what we don't know.” And it came about because of a failure. Stuart Firestein, who's a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wrote a book called Failure: Why Science Is So Successful, in which he quotes Enrico Fermi saying that if you successfully test a hypothesis, you've made a measurement. If you fail, you've made a discovery. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn also talks about the paradigms of what we know and about when experiments start to fail, that's the time that we start to explore new paradigms of knowledge. If our scientific philosophy talks about failure in this very epistemological way as part of how we know what we know in science, then why is it that that attitude toward failure isn't represented in either our academic spaces or in our lab spaces? So this idea of, how do we come back to addressing failure as, not a goal of what we do, but as a byproduct of what we do? How do we navigate those spaces in a way that is generative? And while emotionally difficult, how do we develop resilience around that?

NQ: Daylon alluded to this at the beginning: the way we communicate science is it looks neat and tidy and packaged and sent out as, “This is what happened the first time. This is what we found. It was easy peasy.” But the story in that is completely lost. All of the attempts and all of the iterations are completely lost. So you're not going to find these stories in traditional science communication at all.

Where and how can we tell these stories of failure?

SK: So there's another story that I want to share that actually came out of some of the interviews that I did for my dissertation with an undergraduate researcher recognizing exactly that: when science is published, we take away all the messiness of it and present it in a very linear fashion. She, as an undergraduate researcher, through her experience of failure in the lab, started to recognize this. She told me about her first time at a scientific research conference attending a talk, and the very linear way in which that talk was presented. This was the research question that we had. This is what we did. Here is how it worked. Here is what we found. She said that she was sitting in the back of that room thinking, “No, it isn't. That's not how it worked.” So after the talk, because this was something close to what she was doing in the lab, she went up to the scientist who presented to say, “Okay, now what really happened?”. She said that it was her experience of failure that gave her the courage to go up to that scientist.

The scientist was so impressed by her, by not just her courage, but by her question, that the scientist said, “Okay, come along and I'll take you to the conference bar, and we're going to talk it out. I'll tell you all the failures that happened.” It was something that happened within the scientific conference space, but it happened after the official communication of it. The student was so thrilled by this experience that her failure enabled her to enter this space, that her experiences with failure in a very similar research space allowed her to engage with the scientists in this way, but also that the scientist was willing to share those failures and the messiness of the work that then led to this very polished presentation. And so all that is to say, I think we don't share how messy science is. When students see a 600-page textbook, it is the product of all these scientific experiments that have worked. So we have 600 pages of knowledge from that. But I don't think we recognize how much of that actually comes from accidents that are still discoveries, or failed experiments, or collaborations, or all these other aspects of science that aren't talked about.

SK: We have these named experiments and named discoveries for one or two scientists, not recognizing all the other work and all the other failures that led to that particular experiment. So it is a lot about storytelling in the classroom, in the lab space, for students to recognize that science is messy. Science is not this polished thing, but the currency of this enterprise that we have set up is to present it in a way that people can follow and that people can iterate upon. So you don't share the messiness because that doesn't help with the iteration and with the replicability of science.

What can we do as PIs or more experienced lab mentors?

LC: In lab meetings, you mentioned the culture of saying, “This is what I did,” and then there's no feedback. There are so many different wonderful ways that PIs can actually engineer feedback in a way that allows students to present their failures without even coaching them as failures. There are all these tiny small failures that we have to deal with all the time as scientists. We can design our lab meetings around presenting those, like you suggested Nicole, and then moving forward on actually troubleshooting those. I'll give a few concrete examples. In our lab, our papers that we write go through a full review of our lab before they're submitted. Someone might say, “Okay, here are my methods,” and we read the methods in advance of the lab meeting, and then, “We're going to talk about these three things. Were the methods clear? Did I have enough detail here? Did I do this?” Sometimes people read everybody's methods or they read somebody's introduction or something, and they're just like, I had no clue what you were trying to convey here.

Then there's conversation in our lab about what that person was trying to convey. This open feedback where you have the presenter saying, “This is the thing that I'm struggling with,” or “This is my current challenge, and this is a key part of feedback. These are the things that I want from you all as a group in providing me with feedback. Then this is my next step moving forward.” If lab meetings are just about proving to everybody else in the lab that you are succeeding, then there's no opportunity for anybody to fail in front of people who can help them figure out what they need to learn from that failure. I think it's our responsibility as mentors to create opportunities, not only for us to provide our students with feedback, but for our wonderful colleagues. And when I say colleagues, I include post- and other graduate students in our labs for all of our colleagues to weigh in and help people improve. I think that culture shift can be really important. We can engineer those opportunities for “small f” failures in a safe, cohesive, supportive community, and that will actually lead to more success down the road.

How Can the Scientific Community Destigmatize Failure?

DJ: There’s irony here. Like we're pulling back the curtain on failure. But at the same time, the job is getting harder, I guess. I'm not on social media. But it seems like we live in these Instagram lives where it really is all about the story. The primacy of the story. No one wants to see the picture where you put your shoes on the wrong foot. That's irrelevant. It's not just that you want to have a good story; there's a certain privacy to the missteps. It’s not about shame, but it's like saying, “That's my mistake. That's my failure.” It's hard to share it.

It's clear to me that we're talking about two different things, because there's the public-facing thing, where we need to destigmatize failure just in the abstract as an idea, so we all get it. But also there's an intimacy to fostering a supportive environment around failure, that you can't find at a conference. You're not going to go up there on stage and say, “Here's what I'm looking for from you guys.” That's a risky situation. There is a delicacy there and a balance that really strikes me. I think that there's part of me that's thinking whether transparency is part of it. I talk about the privacy of failure. If everything were documented, and let's say you wave a wand and everything was AI and there was no hiding anything so there was no privacy to your method, would that address the problem? Probably not because it still could maintain the hostile environment around failure if you didn't have the intimacy. That's not a solution. Is it due to not being able to cope with failure as scientists?

What would make the biggest dent in making failure more acceptable?

LC: I'll jump in with two ideas. The first idea is that for those with a lot of privilege to fail without it negatively affecting them, I think it would be really wonderful if those people actually were more transparent about their failures. If they were giving a talk at a conference and they said, “Hey, here's the straightforward story. But know that underlying this straightforward story, there are 50 different people who are working on it, experiencing challenges and failures, and it's actually a messy ball of yarn underneath the linear thing that I'm going to talk about today. And if you have questions, come to the talk.” I think that we need more of that from people who are at the top of their fields. And we do have that. Especially in our field of biology education research. So that's wonderful.

The other thing that I think we can slowly, very slowly do, is start to challenge structures that actually create that privilege. Start to challenge the fact that, on the academic side of failure, there are a lot of singular high-stakes exams for students. Start to challenge that we need to have very specific metrics of attainment and success for all academic positions. I think that those metrics of success are still important. I'm an academic. I'm within the system. Obviously, I value those things. I've had my own successes there after many failures. But I do think that we need to say to ourselves, “Okay, what should success really look like, and are these things going to be the same for everybody?” Those are my two responses, and I'll let Sandhya elaborate on those because some of her current work is actually interviewing successful scientists about their failure experiences.

SK: I'll echo what Lisa said. It is the people who have privilege, who have navigated the system at least publicly, successfully, I think, that can spearhead a lot of the change to make failure more accessible and acceptable. I think there can be two places where this can happen. At conferences, as Lisa was saying, so they can share their failures and share the messiness. At public keynote speeches, so it's not even in the small conference sessions, and the keynote speeches, they could talk about their failures, about what it took to have that one success that then made them so renowned. I think that is a necessary space.

I think the other thing is to make conferences more acceptable spaces to troubleshoot. You can bring your failures to a conference and say, “Hey, this is a community of people who do the work that I do.” I know people worry about things like, “Oh, my project can be scooped by so and so.” But I think it's because of the kinds of standards that we set for this enterprise—the scientific enterprise as a human endeavor—that people think of projects and work and products in that way. But if we set it up for the community so they think of the conference as a time for people to come together and troubleshoot the different problems that they have, and you have this access to this phenomenal intellectual community that can help you troubleshoot.

With the diverse perspectives and expertise that everybody has, that can help make projects so much better. We could change the culture around what happens at conferences and then, similarly, change the culture around what a journal accepts. If you're submitting a publication, potentially a journal can ask, “In the supplementary material, can you walk us through what didn't work?” Because then for a graduate student or an undergraduate student who is following up on that work, instead of trying things that somebody else has already tried that didn't work, they can look at the supplement and say, “Oh, looks like the idea that I had. They've already tried it. But I can work on some of what they had and talk to these folks and create a project that is working off of some of their failures.” There's so much opportunity in the transparency of failure.

NQ: This [a journal of failure] has come up in a few different episodes. I also remember thinking as an early master's student, why don't we have that? Because we're all going to repeat each other's mistakes if we don't. I think that's a great place to end with this wishlist. And I want to emphasize the conference thing. I find that at some conferences, you really feel like you're at a show, like a bit of a dog and pony show. You're sitting there watching the people come up and give you their stories. They're not even really a story. It's just a presentation of what they've accomplished. It is at the conference bar or at the little side events that are not even really part of the main agenda of the conference that you really get the most out of a conference, I find. So making those [moments for sharing failure] more formal would be a wonderful thing.

Final Thoughts

Do you have any words of wisdom or resources you could mention that you would send people to?

LC: I have a resource and also maybe a parting thought. A while ago in our lab, there was a wonderful postdoc named Meredith Henry, who now is a faculty at Georgia State University. We published a paper called . Louise Charkoudian, Jennifer Heemstra, and Shayla Shorter are all co-authors. It's a great resource for thinking about the constructs that lead students to approach challenges in constructive ways and respond to failures in ways that are going to help them learn. So that's the resource.

Then as a mentor, I think that the best thing that we can do as mentors to really help this culture of failure is to ask our students to show us their messy first drafts. We should make sure that we meet regularly and that our meetings are not updates, that they are those troubleshooting meetings, and make sure that there's a culture and expectation in a lab that students are going to come in not knowing things, not being good at things, and failing in order to get better, because every novice is going to do that. That's what our goal is—especially in academia—to train really fantastic scientists. So that should be our expectation from the beginning.

NQ: I would translate that over to experience in industry, too. There has to be that room for discussion and one-on-one meetings and group meetings and team meetings also have to be areas of sharing and not just of proving that you've accomplished something.

SK: I guess this is both a parting word and an extension on what Lisa was saying before with the work that we're doing with scientists. We're interviewing scientists and asking them about their experiences with failure and how they navigated that. One of the things that we're finding is really important is community. Whether that's an identity-based community or the scientific community; whether that's a lab, whether that's friends, whether that's family. I think that something that is maybe perpetuated in the zeitgeist is that you struggle through failure as this lone warrior. But you don't. It takes the community. It takes support to navigate failure and to navigate failure successfully. To recognize that and establish that as a student—having a community that will support them through failure—and as a mentor to establish that community that will support the students that you mentor through failure is really key.

DJ: I’m feeling inspired. I've always thought that my relatively tiny lab was maybe a hindrance. But I think that what I am proud of is that we have a community where everyone's invested in each other. I think that's the key. Even if you have these mega labs, and I'm speaking about academic science as it's familiar to me, I think that they can be successful. But you have to have a lot of uncles, so to speak. You know what I mean? You have to have that tiered mentorship, “aunts and uncles,” because without it, you don't have the fabric, and you don't have the community, and you don't have that template of failure to look up to her and say, “Okay, you know what? You take a few dings and you move on.” I think that's really the key. It's been a part of science forever. We're pulling back the reality of failure, but I think we've all known from our “aunties and uncles” in science that our failures are inevitable and constructive. The best we can do with them is to try and, of course, learn from them and make them a forward failure.

NQ: Thank you very much, Sandhya and Lisa. I think this is one of our most important episodes because the goal of this podcast is to help people learn the things that they're not formally taught as trainees in science. I think this is one of the ones that is specifically learned by experience. If we can shed some light on it and make it happen more transparently and more productively, I think that there's some help there.