Carole Hemmelgarn
speaker
95 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Carole Hemmelgarn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 2: Life and Death (Update) · 14 May 2025
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If nothing else, you may find that thinking about failure on a spectrum from blameworthy to praiseworthy is more useful than the standard blaming and shaming. It may even make you less afraid of failure. That said, not everyone is a fan of Edmondson's ethos of embracing failure.
A research article by Jeffrey Ray at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County is called Dispelling the Myth that Organizations Learn from Failure. He writes, failure shouldn't even be in a firm's vocabulary to learn from failure or otherwise. A firm must have an organizational learning capability.
If the firm has the learning capability in the first instance, why not apply it at the beginning of a project to prevent a failure rather than waiting for a failure to occur and then reacting to it? But Amy Edmondson's failure spectrum has been winning admirers, including Gary Klein, the research psychologist best known as the pioneer of naturalistic decision-making.
OK, let's do that. After the break, two case studies of failure, one of them toward the blameworthy end of the spectrum.
I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. John Van Rienen is a professor at the London School of Economics. He studies innovation, but years ago, he did some time in the British Civil Service.
The National Health Service is the UK's publicly funded healthcare system. And there was one particular reform that Van Rienen got to see up close.
The project was called Connecting for Health, and there was substantial enthusiasm for it. At least the ad campaign was enthusiastic.
But the train rolled on despite these potential problems. Connecting for health required a massive overhaul of hardware systems as well as software systems.
British Parliament ultimately called this attempted reform, quote, one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos ever. So what kind of lessons can be learned from this failure?
I've read that the haste, especially the haste of awarding contracts at the time, was considered a great thing because it was so atypical of how government worked. And it was hailed as, you know, a new way of the government doing business. In the end, that haste turned out to be a problem, though, correct?
If you are the kind of person who likes to understand and analyze failure in order to mitigate future failures, what might be useful here is to overlay the National Health Service's IT fiasco onto Amy Edmondson's spectrum of causes of failure. Reconfiguring a huge IT system certainly qualifies as a task challenge, but there were shades of inability and inattention at work here as well.
All of those causes reside toward the blameworthy end of the scale. As for the praiseworthy end of the spectrum, that's where experimentation can be found. The NHS project didn't incorporate much experimentation.
It was more command and control, top-down, with little room for adjustment and little opportunity to learn from the small failures that experimentation can produce and which can prevent big failures. Experimentation, if you think about it, is the foundation of just about all the learning we do as humans. And yet, we seem to constantly forget this.
Maybe that's because experimentation will inevitably produce a lot of failure. I mean, that's the point. And most of us just don't want to fail at all, even if it's in the service of long-term success. So let's see if we can't adjust our focus here. Let's talk about real experimentation.
And for that, we will need not another social scientist like John Van Rienen or Amy Edmondson, as capable as they are, but an actual science scientist. Here is one of the most acclaimed scientists of the modern era.
And if I say to you, Bob, what kind of scientist are you exactly? How do you answer that question?
Langer holds more than 1,500 patents, including those that are pending. He runs the world's largest biomedical engineering lab at MIT, and he is one of the world's most highly cited biotech researchers. He also played a role in the founding of dozens of biotech firms, including Moderna, which produced one of the most effective COVID vaccines.
One thing Langer is particularly known for is drug delivery. That is developing and refining how a given drug is delivered and absorbed at the cellular level. A time-release drug, for instance, is the sort of thing we take for granted today, but it took a while to get there.
One problem Langer worked on back in the 1970s was finding a drug delivery system that would prevent the abnormal growth of blood vessels. The chemical that inhibits the growth is quite large by biological standards. And there was consensus at the time that a time release wouldn't work on large molecules.
But as Langer once put it, I didn't know you couldn't do it because I hadn't read the literature. So he ran experiment after experiment after experiment before finally developing a recipe that worked. Decades later, thanks to all that failure, his discovery played a key role in how Moderna used messenger RNA to create its COVID vaccine.
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