Confronting Failure

Innovation, technology development, data accumulation, and interconnectivity are all rapidly increasing in our modern world (Friedman 2017). Across disciplines, these advances have led to exciting developments such as novel vaccine mechanisms (Le et al. 2020), innovative ways to search for and provide information (Cao, Liang, and Li 2018), and creative uses of media and artistic expression (Kaimal et al. 2020). However, at the same time as such advances, and in some cases due to increasing connectivity and technological advancements, problems are becoming more complex. Challenges related to climate change are increasing in multitude and magnitude (Cardinale et al. 2014; Daszak et al. 2020; Pachauri et al. 2014), viral pandemics have more potential to spread and may be more lethal (Madhav et al. 2017), issues with data storage and security abound (Wang et al. 2010). Te increasing complexity of our world in addition to novel advancements also make researchers more prone to encounter challenges and failures while they search for lasting and tenable solutions. Today, more than ever, we are in need of a future generation of researchers and innovators who respond adaptively to challenge and failure and who display resilience when faced with setbacks. Although the need for resilient individuals may be becoming more pressing, it is not new. Across STEM, the humanities, and the arts, resilience and adaptive coping in the face of failure have been recognized as valued, and even necessary, skills (Harsh, Maltese, and Tai 2001; Henry et al. 2019; Manalo and Kapur 2018; Sawyer 2019; Simpson and Maltese 2017). In some disciplines, failure is seen as an epistemic experience; that is, it is viewed as generating and contributing to the learning that happens within the discipline. Tis is refected in the title of Simpson and Maltese’s 2017 article describing interviews with STEM professionals: “‘Failure Is a Major Component of Learning Anything’: Te Role of Failure in the Development of STEM Professionals.” Indeed, entrepreneurs across disciplines recognize the role of failure in their personal development (Lattacher and Wdowiak 2020), and professors who learn from rejections and resubmit grants more quickly afer a failed attempt tend to be awarded more grants (Yin et al. 2019).