How Hollywood Doesn't Learn From Failure
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We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment The Last Show with David Cooper Hollywood loves a comeback story, a movie that's a flop that somehow leads to the next blockbuster. But a new study suggests for project-based teams like movie crews that break up when the film wraps or break up when a project ends, failure doesn't teach people on that team much at all. It just kind of can make things worse. I'm here with Suresh Muthulingam, who's a supply chain management professor at the Smeal College of Business, Penn State, to discuss this. Suresh, welcome to the show.
Thank you, David. Glad to be here.
Look, there's this cultural myth of failure being a great teacher, this fail fast, fail often.
What cultural myth about failure is prevalent in Hollywood?
I used to work in Silicon Valley. We heard that a lot. But in Hollywood, failure might just repeat itself and not really be a thing that teams learn from. What's going on there?
Yeah, so the main issue really in the movie industry or with teams which have similar characteristics is that after you complete the project or you complete the movie, there is a gap between the time you finish the movie and the time you get to know about the results. So what happens is the team gets disbanded after the movie is done. And they have moved on. So there is no clear way for them to analyze what went right or what went wrong. So when, especially in the context of a failure, you don't know what things didn't work out. So that's number one. The second issue is when you're working with teams and if there is a failure, failure is sort of hard to kick it. When things don't go well, you're not like really confident.
very happy. You feel like, oh, maybe I did a good job, but maybe someone else didn't do such a good job. So you tend to rationalize failure away, that probably things didn't work out because there were some other team member who didn't pull their weight. And plus, this is an industry where people are worried about their image and overall appearance and how they appear to the industry. So they sort of rationalize away failure. So that is the second thing. And the third thing is... After a movie succeeds or fails, there is no clear systematic review of what happened. So in the absence of such a feedback, you don't tend to learn from failure. And the point is, even in an industry like Silicon Valley, if you fail, but if the teams keep changing frequently, failure will not really help you.
What you need to learn from, if you want to learn from failure, you need to have some stability in your team so that the teams can analyze what went wrong. People can overcome their biases and hopefully learn or kick away some nuggets of useful wisdom which they can apply on other projects.
So what I'm hearing is failure is not this great thing we can learn from in and of itself. It's what happens after. It's the feedback loop. It's the dealing with what went wrong with the people who it went wrong with. The saying shouldn't just be fail fast, fail often. It should be fail fast, fail often, get feedback, I suppose.
You get feedback and maybe reflect on what went wrong. And it requires some amount of change. The only learning happens, okay, you may know what went wrong, but after you know, you need to act or change behavior. And if you don't do that, knowing is not enough. It has to translate into action. And in the absence of such a connection, learning from failure is very, very challenging.
Now, what ends up happening in Hollywood if a team has a flop and then a similar team comes together later on? Are they likely to have another flop or something?
So there could be exceptions, but on average, what we find from our data and from the analysis of around 2,100 movies over a couple of decades is, yes, on average, if you have team members who have primarily experienced failure, and if they come together, then more likely the current project will also not do well.
I wonder if that's true for TV, especially TV in the 90s, where teams just work together every week, put out like 24 episodes a year across various seasons.
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