This fascinating one-day event, at Imperial College, London, looked at failure from many angles. Speakers included established professors, writers, publishers, as well as early career researchers, on what failure means, and how it affects them.
Well-known writer and broadcaster Maggie Aderin-Pocock set the tone for the day by revealing her school career was largely one of failure – she attended 13 schools in 12 years, yet went on to obtain a physics degree and a PhD. As a subsequent speaker pointed out, sometimes it’s OK to talk about failure if your subsequent career is successful.
Of course, failure may not only be failure at exams (although the participants were, as you can imagine, usually successful at that challenge). Failure may range from small-scale, such as lab equipment not working properly, to life-threatening, such as rejection from a grant or job application. The conference included break-out sessions looking at specific areas, such as failure and education, failure and innovation, and failure and power.
It was clear from the day that failure affects the entirety of the academic process. One 2023 study suggests that academic articles are becoming “less disruptive”, on account perhaps of a fear of failure to have the paper accepted.
On a wider front, Nessa Carey pointed out how attitudes to failure in higher education and in business differ widely. Failure in business tends to be seen as a collective responsibility, while with academic projects, failure is seen as individual (and hence more shaming). Within a research project, failure is more likely to be terminal for an early-career researcher than for the principal investigator. Indeed, one speaker suggested that some early-career researchers are sacrificed by their principal investigators, to keep the project going.
One theme emerged very powerfully: the prestige of working in a laboratory. Several participants, even Magdalena Skipper, editor of Nature, described themselves as a “failed scientist” because they no longer worked in a lab. In Skipper’s case, you would think her illustrious career in science publishing would more than outweigh the regret at leaving the lab, but nonetheless, leaving a laboratory seemed to hit researchers hard: “I am another statistic of women who leave research”, said one ex-ECR. One PhD researcher revealed they spent an entire year of their doctorate sticking to the “low-hanging fruit”, concentrating on the more easily attainable results, rather thantackling the big question of the thesis, where the risk of failure was higher.
The experience of working in a laboratory does not, from this conference, appear to be an entirely happy one. External studies suggest that the research lifetime of scientists is becoming steadily shorter (one study found the time at which half of a cohort has left academic publishing has declined from 35 years in the 1960s to only five years a half century later).
Is this the fault of the education system? We know that education concentrates on the outcome, not the journey; there were disparaging references to the “cook book” approach to lab work, simply following instructions, without learning. Yet it looked to me there were clear signs of support and celebration of the student experience at Imperial. Wayne Mitchell described how he interviews hundreds of Imperial students from minority groups about their life journey. The Imperial science writing workshop is just one example of students coming together to share their creative skills.
Was there a conclusion? There were suggestions, certainly: how to increase the curiosity of students; using other arts, such as musical performance, to “wrestle” with failure; learning to accept failure as part of the creative process. There were calls to change the “social contract” of research groups, and to change the metrics for research, and even for academics to focus on teaching rather than research. Creating 500 successes through educating kids may after all be worth more than a citation in Nature. But for the foreseeable future, the latter is more recognized than the former.
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