Failure, Provided You Can Afford It

I was listening to Radio 4 on Boxing Day, with James Dyson guest editing Today. He kept returning to a familiar theme: the importance of failure. Failure as teacher. Failure as an essential part of innovation. It is an appealing idea, and not an untrue one.

But it rests on an assumption that rarely gets said out loud.

Failure has to be affordable.

That thought did not come from theory. It came from experience. We invested in a start up operating firmly in the Dyson sphere, if you will forgive the pun. A new vacuum cleaner. Serious engineering, real intent. We backed it in two ways: providing business premises and making a financial investment.

The company failed.

Brexit came first. It introduced friction, cost and uncertainty into supply chains and exporting that had previously been manageable. Components became harder to source. Margins tightened. Planning horizons shortened. The business survived, but with less room for error.

Then Covid arrived.

Demand collapsed. Supply chains seized up. Cashflow was squeezed from both ends. The business limped through the crisis, but emerged weakened, with no spare capacity left to absorb further shocks. There was no bounce back. The company could not recover.

What makes this harder to dismiss as an abstract story is that the failure is tangible. We still have a few of the machines. Finished products. Properly designed, manufactured, boxed and branded. Not prototypes, not vapourware, not a pitch deck fantasy. Objects that existed, were sold, and worked. Hay declares it bulletproof. 

When people talk cheerfully about failure, they rarely have an artefact sitting in front of them.

Here is the asymmetry that changed how I hear talk of failure. I could afford that failure. The investment came from excess, disposable income. Losing it was unpleasant, but survivable. It narrowed options rather than ending them. For me, failure was a risk I knowingly carried.

The company could not afford it.

For the business, failure was not a learning experience. There was no second iteration, no chance to apply lessons. The runway ended. Employees lost jobs. Founders lost years of work and momentum. Failure did not teach the company anything useful, because it ended it.

This is what tends to be missing when successful people talk about failure. They are often describing it from the perspective of someone whose failures are cushioned. Their mistakes stretch them, but they do not break them.

That does not make the argument wrong. It makes it incomplete.

Failure is educational when it happens in a system that allows recovery. When shocks are survivable. When the downside is buffered. Brexit reduced that margin. Covid erased what was left.

So when we praise failure, the honest version of the argument needs a qualifier. Failure can be valuable, even necessary, but only when it is borne by those who can survive it.

Otherwise we are not celebrating learning or innovation. We are confusing survivorship with virtue, and mistaking the ability to bounce back for a universal human trait, when in reality it is often just the privilege of having something solid to land on.