There is a lot of talk about the importance of failure and mistakes for learning. People are encouraged to fail fast and fail often and are told that to be successful they need to fail more. Trainers are told they need to develop training environments where participants are encouraged to fail and encouraged to make mistakes. We hear it said that we learn more from our failures than we do our successes. Maybe that is because we fail to examine our successes to extract the lessons and the learning. Too often we only debrief when something goes wrong, and we perceive there was a failure, and may only consider it a ‘failure’ when there is a perceived “bad” outcome.
Personally, I think we put too much emphasis on failure and mistakes and instead need to shift our focus to striving. Striving to learn, striving to improve, striving to grow, striving to be a little better today than we were yesterday. Striving comes with the understanding that in the striving involves struggle and friction and that sometimes we might fail to accomplish a task, mission, or objective. When we do fail, it is an opportunity to learn from the experience and move forward better off for the learning.
Speaking of striving and learning, Robert Bjork PhD, a professor at UCLA, has talked for years about the importance of “Desirable Difficulties” for learning. Andrew Huberman PhD, a professor at Stanford School of Medicine and host of The Huberman Lab Podcast, has talks about the reality that if there is no friction, if there is no struggle, there is no learning. The Challenge Point theory suggests that for us to learn, grow and improve we need to train at the outer edges of our skill level. In that learning zone we will encounter desirable difficulties, struggle, and friction. The research on Challenge vs. Threat States shows that if we see this type of training as a challenge instead of a threat it encourages approach behaviors and will influence our physiology in ways that enhance performance. This aligns nicely with the philosophy from Mitch Greene PhD on the importance of choosing courage over confidence, which encourages us to step into the challenge, and allows us to embrace the struggle and embrace the suck that often occurs on the path to learning and to look for the learning, look for the good and dare to be great.
Understanding that training and testing are different, then what exactly does “failure” mean in a physical training or performance context? Did the trainee accomplish a task in a manner that he or she can articulate was reasonable and lawful for him or her based on the totality of circumstances, but ‘failed’ to accomplish the task the way you, the trainer, wanted them to, or the way you think you would have done it? Did they accomplish the task, but failed to use a taught technique to do so? Did they fail to use a technique exactly as taught? Did they fail to accomplish a task within an allotted time and if so, how is that ‘acceptable’ time limited determined? If your instruction is based on principles and concepts, then ‘failure’ becomes more of an abstract concept and may be difficult to define.
I disagree with the philosophy that we need to encourage failure and mistakes in training. I think training needs to be a safe place to fail and make mistakes, as long as we learn and grow from the experience, but we should not encourage failure and mistakes. There is a difference between failure and mistakes being encouraged and failure and mistakes being acceptable. Participants need to experience increasingly complex challenges in contextually relevant training environments. These challenges will involve struggle and friction as part of the officer’s journey to becoming a dextrous, adaptable, and resilient problem solver. Those challenges will require them to solve the problem they are facing in a manner that is reasonable and lawful. Those solutions will fall somewhere on the sliding scale of desirability. As a result of time, reflection, effortful retrieval, spaced practice, and evaluated experience they will continue to move towards the “more desirable” end of the scale.
My challenge is to trainers is to move away from the focus on encouraging failing and mistakes and shift the focus to striving, struggle, friction, learning and growth and help the men and women we are train to develop strategies to understand the value of striving and struggle and embrace the struggle, and the friction as part of the journey of learning.
Take care.
Brian Willis
Winning Mind Training – Providing practical training to law enforcement professionals in the areas of instructor development, Performance Enhancement Imagery, leadership and mindset.
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