Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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.
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: Why don't Hollywood teams learn from their failures?
So that industry has an advantage in the sense that the teams are a little bit more stable than in movies. Movies, maybe sometimes you have a set of people who repeat, but the entire team very rarely repeats.
And these learnings aren't just for Hollywood actors, which is not everyone, let's be honest. Some people work, maybe they're contractors, maybe the style of their work is they're on a short project with a team, there's some outcome, maybe it's a failure, but then immediately they're on to a new project, a new team, a new gig.
I feel like these learnings can apply to everyone who works in that format. What can you do to learn from your failures if you find yourself in a short-term project format?
So if you're on a short-term project, that should be ideally after the end of the project, there should be some means of sort of analyzing the project, trying to see what went right and what didn't go wrong. So in the absence of such a mechanism, learning becomes very, very challenging. And that's the problem you face in many short-term project situations, whether you're...
working on a construction industry, whether you're working on a consulting project, whether you're drilling an oil well. So after you disband the team, if that review process is not there, learning is not going to happen. It's quite challenging. So if you can do a review, that is great. Or more importantly, you can be a little bit more careful when you are actually putting together the team.
Just don't put together all the people because you find them. Try to look at their history, whether they have had successful projects
earlier and try to bring together people who have demonstrated success especially in such settings and more importantly we find that the person who puts together the team plays a critical role so this person like in the movie industry it is the executive producers and producers who put together the team so whoever is the person who is in charge of putting together the team if they are able to if you select that person carefully
If that person has a history of success of doing things well, then most more likely they will put together a team that has a higher chance of executing the project with success.
And if you're someone who organizes short term projects, I guess there's value in debrief and meeting afterward and discussing what went wrong. I used to find those meetings so boring when I worked in Silicon Valley, but reflecting on it and talking to you, I'm like, oh, I guess those did have value. I guess we didn't repeat mistakes or learn from them.
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Chapter 4: How does team disbandment affect learning from failure?
Absolutely. I mean, a failure is only useful once you have reflected on it, diagnosed it, and then you internalize the lessons and you can act on them.
After doing this research, Suresh, do you look at movie credits differently when you see like the people in the movie and you're like, oh, well, they were used to work on a flop. I imagine this one won't be very good.
I have not yet really gone into that details. But maybe the thing I do is I really reflect on movies and think about them a bit more carefully. What's the team that's worked on that?
Well, Suresh Muthulingam is a supply chain management professor at the Smeal College of Business, Penn State. Suresh, I've enjoyed the chat. Thanks for discussing your paper with me and talking about failure.
Thank you, David. Absolute pleasure.
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