(Episode 97) Navigating Failure in Academia

Taryn Bell [: 00:00:25

Failure. It's an evocative term. Even just hearing the word induces an emotional reaction in us. But failure is a normal part of working in academia. Whether it's having your journal article torn apart by reviewers, getting that dreaded email that your grant application wasn't successful, or finding out that you didn't get that job you wanted, failure is something that research communities deal with on a regular basis. I'm Taryn and I'm a researcher developer at the University of Leeds. The longer I work in academia, the more I am fascinated by the notion of failure and how we deal with it. It's one of those things that, funnily enough, universities have failed to engage with in any meaningful way.

Taryn Bell [: 00:01:10

We spend a lot of time helping our researchers how to write cvs, apply for funding, or develop their leadership skills, but we don't really spend any time helping them develop the practical and emotional tools to manage failure. So in this week's episode, I'll be diving into this trickiest of topics. I'll consider what failure means, who is allowed to fail, and what we can do to better support our communities. Throughout this episode, you'll hear from researcher developers and academics who are working in this area, and hopefully you'll come away with a few useful points and resources to help you in your own work. But before we think about what we can do, we first need to sit back and think a little bit more about the notion of failure itself. This is something I've been thinking about for a little while now, and at September's Vitae conference held in Birmingham in the uk, I ran a session with Anna Pilz from the University of Edinburgh and Johanna Stadlbauer from the University of Graz in Austria. Both Anna and Johanna are already doing some amazing work supporting researchers to think about failure. And you may remember Anna from our previous episode on on how we can support researchers after unsuccessful funding applications.

Taryn Bell [: 00:02:25

Our Vitae session, called the Forum of Failures and Fiascos, gave us a chance to share our own failures, consider the different stakes of failure, and brainstorm opportunities to embrace, learn from, and even celebrate failure. We caught up after the session to talk about what we learned.

Johanna Stadtbauer [: 00:02:43

Well, I enjoyed doing this, the three of us, because we all brainstormed about our own personal misfortunes in our careers so far and compared them to each other and also analyzed sort of what makes a career misfortune. Why do you perceive it as a career misfortune? So comparing our experiences was helpful and also comparing the different stakes.

Anna Pilz [: 00:03:11

For me, I suppose it was a very enriching conversation. And I particularly take away the complexity that failure brings with it and conversations afterwards about why do we frame it even as failure if it's something that's very common? So if we're thinking about the unsuccess rates of grant applications or fellowship applications, for instance, so if it's normal, then, you know, why does it need to be framed within a sense of failure? And I thought about this a little bit afterwards, and to me, it's nonetheless important to kind of quite have that tag because it's an emotional response. So if I, you know, don't get accepted for a fellowship, I feel like I wasn't good enough, I failed. And I think that's a valid emotional response that we sort of have to acknowledge. And what I take away is one of the ideas that came up in one of the groups is the aftercare or the acknowledgement for those who failure might mean that's the end of a career.

Taryn Bell [: 00:04:14

One of the interesting things that the session really highlighted for us is the inequity involved in failure. I'm in a position of real privilege where failure isn't just tolerated, it's seen as part of the process. At both Leeds and at my previous institution, I was explicitly told by managers that I should feel free to fail. Emma, who you'll all know if you listen to this podcast regularly, told me that I shouldn't be afraid to fail. She said, I'd rather you gave something a go and learnt from it than didn't try at all. The way Emma framed it for me was that fairly is a part of thinking big, working in an ambitious way. But let's be honest, this isn't the norm.

Johanna Stadtbauer [: 00:04:56

When you submit the fellowship application, and it is, you are perhaps an international researcher and your next job, your next contract, your income is dependent on the success of this fellowship application. The stakes can be quite different to someone who, for example, gets into an argument with their boss and is a resident in the country and born in the country that they are currently in and can, somewhat, due to family wealth, maybe afford to leave a position where they had a conflict. So, and we brought that at the start of the session to get people to reflect. When you put on activities for researchers that help them handle failure or that help them being more open about failure, then you really also for these activities have to reflect that all your participants might have slightly different circumstances in which they can withstand failure or in which they will maybe totally be destroyed by failure for the time being.

Taryn Bell [: 00:06:04

So yes, failure affects everyone, but the stakes are higher for some than others. We also have to think about the narratives that we build around failure, as both Anna and Johanna discuss. We often talk about failure from the perspective of people who failed but were later successful. But this isn't always the case.

Johanna Stadtbauer [: 00:06:26

There have been things like the so called fuck up nights in the entrepreneurial sector and it's always framed as so I had a setback, but then I rose like a phoenix. So there might be more reluctance to sit with the emotion of really something that feels to you as if you have failed you. And also five years later you haven't risen like a phoenix. You know, you maybe have left academia. So I don't think framed like that. Everyone is always so keen to dwell on that. The things where someone publicly shares the misfortunes are always like and look, I'm still standing and I'm even successful and I have gotten over it. But this other part, not so much maybe.

Taryn Bell [: 00:07:10

Yeah. Some of this need to frame failure as a part of the path to success may come from a good place, a need to help people feel that this isn't the end, that there's a next step.

Anna Pilz [: 00:07:22

Within the researcher development environment, we're also very keen on proaction and identifying the next steps and how do we move kind of on, you know, action planning and forward looking rather than necessarily addressing and sitting with emotions. So I think there is a reluctance to actually sit with what feels uncomfortable. And I think we need to learn and train ourselves as researcher developers to go into those spaces where we might also feel challenged and uncomfortable.

Taryn Bell [: 00:07:55

I think this final point from Anna is key. It's really tempting to want to fix things, to move on from failure immediately and think about what you'll do next. But as with any negative emotion, to manage it, we need to learn to sit with it. As researcher developers, we have to learn to be comfortable sitting in those spaces too. Someone who is doing a brilliant job of this is Darcey Gillie. Darcey works as the Career Doctor, supporting people to think about their careers. And she also works at the University of Edinburgh as a careers consultant. Darcey runs a workshop called Failure: We're Doing It Wrong, which focuses specifically on the emotional side of failure.

Darcey Gillie [: 00:08:39

In the workplace, in our lives, in the lives of the people that we manage. We need to start looking at the emotional dimensions of the things that we experience, not just the task.

Taryn Bell [: 00:08:51

Darcey's approach is a really interesting one, given its focus on managing our emotions. This shouldn't be equated with resilience, though, which is a term I personally don't really like. Maybe this is me being finicky. I just, I just roll my eyes every time I hear the term resilience because I feel like for me, resilience is just an excuse to not change the culture we're working in.

Darcey Gillie [: 00:09:15

Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of shifting. In some cases it's shifting the blame. In other cases it's just kind of papering over the cracks. So one of the other approaches I take, and I have to say I never run this workshop the same way twice because it just depends on the audience, is looking at perceived failure. So sometimes I talk to clients who are having a very deep emotional response to failure, but as we talk about it, the failure is not theirs. They're taking on the blame for it. So, you know, unfortunately I, you know, I listen to clients who talk about their experiences of racism in the workplace, but through the course of those conversations, helping them unpick their individual experience and helping lift that burden of perceived failure on their part and doing some of that reparative work with them to help them understand, you know, their experiences in the past and where it's worked and where they felt safe and, and you know, where they've had agency and control from the beginning.

Darcey Gillie [: 00:10:20

And when I write the, the advert saying, you know, we are going to get into uncomfortable places, so, you know, please kind of self evaluate and see if you feel ready to do some of that work. I think some of the other things I do is Chatham House rules. So I set those or even Las Vegas rules. So, you know, what happens in the workshop stays in the workshop. You know, we're just not even discussing it elsewhere. I also make the point that the assumption that we're making is that we're working with someone who is enjoying positive mental health at that time. Because when we start getting into kind of situations of mental ill health, I say, you know, that's a different workshop delivered by a different professional. That's not my expertise.

Darcey Gillie [: 00:11:12

And similarly, with specific issues of equality and diversity, you know, I said, again, you know, I'm, I'm making, you know, very flat assumptions because again, it's, that would be a workshop delivered by a very different professional. And if any of those professionals want to work with me, I think there's good work there to be done. But that's not My expertise and I feel that would be. That would be risky to everyone. So, you know, my workshop is very much a starting point to begin exploring. And then I also always do it kind of focused on what the experience is like for other people. So as a kind of scaffolding measure, because I think it can be too much, too fast to start looking at ourselves. So I acknowledge we do have to look at ourselves.

Darcey Gillie [: 00:11:53

But today let's, let's use our empathetic imagination and think about how it's being experienced by, by the people we manage and work with.

Taryn Bell [: 00:12:03

As researcher developers. Dealing with the emotions surrounding failure is something that requires real sensitivity from us. And for some people, this is scary. You may not feel comfortable doing that kind of thing yourself, but in Darcey's view, this doesn't need to be difficult. And there are places where we can.

Darcey Gillie [: 00:12:23

Start, there are things to be done. You know that, for instance, you're already doing your work with Anna and Johanna Stadlbauer is to start getting groups of people together, start working with our counseling colleagues, occupational psychology, the philosophers, the careers professionals, our HR colleagues.

Taryn Bell [: 00:12:46

The FailSpace project, funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, has developed an interesting framework for getting different stakeholders in the room to discuss failure. I recently caught up with Jaela Jankovic, professor of Cultural Policy and Participation at the University of Leeds, who led the project. She told me more about the development of failspace and what it hopes to achieve.

Leila Jancovich [: 00:13:10

Prior to coming to the University of Leeds, I actually worked in the cultural sector for many years and as a kind of. As a practitioner and as a researcher and doing the research. I was both aware of and involved in doing lots of evaluations that were kind of telling great stories of successful projects and fantastic work. And I kind of got increasingly frustrated with the narratives of success and what seemed like an inability to talk about the failures. And particularly within the context of my work around policy and participation, that we know that there's massive inequalities in the cultural sector in terms of who works in IT and who participates. So the fail space started from that kind of question of why do we tell all these stories and yet the evidence says nothing's really changing and what would be the benefits if we actually looked at the failures and tried to learn from those failures?

Taryn Bell [: 00:14:12

FailSpace is a really nice reminder that failure is rarely an all or nothing term. Few things in life are an absolute failure or an absolute success.

Leila Jancovich [: 00:14:23

So from the research we did, what we kind of identified was that some of the barriers, why people don't talk about Failure were because they don't see other people doing it, because people saw success and failure as binary opposites. You're either one or the other. And so there's no incentive to talk about your failures if it makes you feel personally a failure and just kind of a general fear, a lack of trust between people. So what we did, apart from our research, we designed a toolkit to help make conversations about failure more normal. So to help people see examples of other people's failures so that they were less scared about talking about their own. But more importantly, to understand failures not as binary opposites, but as being on a spectrum with very little being an absolute success or an absolute failure, most things being somewhere in the middle. So kind of our framework and our toolkit we designed is based on the idea that failure exists across the spectrum. It's experienced differently for different people.

Leila Jancovich [: 00:15:27

So what I consider a success, you might consider a failure. And we need to understand those different perspectives exists at different times. So what might feel successful on the day might not have long term impact or vice versa, and also exists at different aspects. So something might be really successful at creating a good experience for participants, but might not actually fulfill its fundamental purpose of changing the world, or might be really good in terms of the profile it's got, but might not actually be good for the local people involved in a project. So it's kind of asking people to recognize success and failure as being constantly in negotiation, contingent, but coexisting all the time.

Taryn Bell [: 00:16:14

It was originally developed for use in the cultural sector, but Leila told me that they've received a lot of interest from other sectors since they developed the tools.

Leila Jancovich [: 00:16:22

But what we found very quickly when we started publishing our research and designing our toolkit were people contacting us from outside the sector saying, oh, this is really interesting. So we have actually been testing it in other sectors. So we've been working with the British Science association, we've been working with the Local Trust and Community Development, we are working with local authorities. And we found that the framework can be applied in any sector. Really?

Leila Jancovich [: 00:16:49

It's a tool I'm increasingly kind of being invited to look at within a university context.

Leila Jancovich [: 00:16:56

And I think there's something particularly interesting in a university context that one of the big problems about failure is the fear of failure from education.

Taryn Bell [: 00:17:05

Throughout my discussions with Anna, Johanna, Darcey and Leila, one theme kept coming up again and again. Fear at heart. We are scared of failure. We don't see it as an opportunity. And that's because for many of us there are real serious stakes involved in failure. That's not something we should shy away from. Failure is a normal part of academic life, but we have to acknowledge its complexity. It affects different people in different ways, and for some those effects might be entirely negative.

Taryn Bell [: 00:17:39

But we need to be more open about failure. We need to have these discussions, and from my own experience, there's a kind of liberation in being able to talk about failure openly and honestly. Clearly these aren't comfortable conversations to have at first, but as you've heard throughout this episode, we already have plenty of tangible ways to start these conversations. The key thing, though, is to resist the urge to immediately take action and give ourselves the time to sit with and work through those feelings. And that's not something that most of us do very often. I've really enjoyed taking the time to think about failure, and for me this has inspired some work I'm planning for 2025 along with my colleague Heledd, but you'll have to come back next year when we'll share more about that. If this is something you found really interesting, then you are in luck. Anna Ioana and I spent a lot of time during our VISAI session thinking about how we could showcase best practice in this area, and this has led to the development of the Fairleas repository full of ideas, inspirations and real life examples.

Taryn Bell [: 00:18:42

You'll find a link to the repository in the show notes where you'll also find links to all of the initiatives and resources mentioned throughout this episode. My hope is that this is just the beginning of a longer conversation. Please do get in touch if you'd like to come onto the show and discuss your own thoughts, experiences and insights into failure in academia. But that's all we have time for today, so best of luck with your future failures and we'll see you for another episode soon.