Print This PostAcademic failure has been at the forefront of my mind in the last couple of weeks. I failed big time in a communication matter in my lab, and it has been the cause of a couple of sleepless nights and a big bout of self-reflection. I was a co-PI on an unsuccessful Dementia Frontiers Fund bid, and was therefore lucky to be spared the awful experience of the lead PIs of having to attend an event designed around announcing winners.
Failure is a difficult thing to talk about in academia, and not for the reasons usually given. It needs to be acknowledged, particularly when talking from a point of privilege such as mine, that academia is one of the few career situations outside of competitive sport and elite creative careers where not too many failures genuinely can result in the loss of a job, the end to a career trajectory, and huge disruptions to a person’s sense of self and worth. In the increasingly zero-sum funding and employment environment that we find ourselves in, with salary support for early independence harder and harder to come by, the very real risks of failure must not be trivialised. So while this article is going to talk about academic failure, some of the things you can encourage in yourself and your staff to build their resilience, please also note that I recognise that the biggest failure is that we are working in an environment that systematically amplifies the emotional impact of what should be ordinary professional setbacks.
This is a systemic failure, not a personal one.
To get the stuff you have to say out of the way, failure is an inevitable feature of science. The very fact that we have to state a hypothesis, our best guess of the way the world works from the data we have, and then test it, means that a decent amount of the time, we’re going to be wrong. Failure, and failing well, is therefore an essential feature of science. This sets up the first piece of advice that you find throughout the literature on failure – it’s not how you fail, it’s how you respond to failure that is the best indicator of future success. As Group Leaders, we can encourage a positive attitude to failure in our labs in a number of ways.
Mistakes happen, and everyone should be able to say so
The first is to be open and non-judgmental about the fact that mistakes happen. Controls are missed, tubes are dropped, code will have errors. Everyone in a molecular biology lab has run a DNA gel in the wrong direction, contaminated our cells with some funky fungus, or used the wrong statistic to report our results at some points in our early careers. What is important is that your team members feel they can be open about the nitty-gritty of this work so that mistakes are noted, discussed neutrally, and mechanisms introduced to prevent similar mistakes in future. Junior team members should receive good day-to-day training in their basic techniques and feel able to ask “stupid” questions to other team members. Most of these mistakes are trivial and easily addressed.
When the mistake is an expensive one
Occasionally, a mistake will be made that will cost you a lot of money. This mistake is almost certainly an accident, but the outcome for your lab may be severe to devastating. Keeping this purposefully vague, two of my past colleagues, both in successful careers now, made serious mistakes in the lab. The first dropped a stack of well plates full of expensive samples that were not individually labelled, and the whole experiment had to be abandoned as we had no idea what samples were what. The second had some problems balancing an ultracentrifuge rotor, and the rotor and spindle ended up so severely damaged that the ultra had to be decommissioned. The response of the group leaders to these extremely serious mistakes was very different. While I’m sure both were cursing (and panicking) in private, the first reacted with anger and frustration in public, and that caused big problems throughout the lab for months to follow. The second reacted calmly, got to the bottom of the problem, ensured that the team member was reassured and fully trained to prevent this from happening again, and the atmosphere across the lab remained collaborative and productive. I can only hope that when the same thing happens to me, as it inevitably will, that I can muster the grace and compassion of this second group leader. Outside of these anecdotes, there is evidence (discussed here) that this type of leadership is critical to encouraging innovation and success, decreases toxic competition between employees, and is an important step towards changing the conversation around failure in academia.
Talking about your own academic failure
Being open about your own failures with your team and the wider academic environment will also contribute to improving our understanding of, and responses to failure. My wonderful colleagues “Up the Hill” in Oxford, Sana Suri and Ludovica Griffanti, have a shared “Not Yet” board. The board has a few categories, including research papers, fellowship and grant applications, and whenever a team member gets a rejection, they stick a star on the board. At twenty stars, everyone gets to go out for dinner. This is a fabulous idea, bringing the idea of failing out into the open, accepting that it is a part of academic life, and giving a good excuse to get people together to celebrate both the ups and downs of this strange career path.
Other researchers are publishing their “CVs of Failures” to normalise the idea that even careers that seem like a simple string of successes have a lot of rejections and tough moments hidden beneath them. The introduction of the narrative CV to grant applications gives more bandwidth for exploring mitigating circumstances, attempting to go beyond simple characterisation of success as peer-reviewed papers, and acknowledging other metrics of success such as community service, public engagement and resource generation. A final note – please don’t take this to mean that you should share your rant about the unfairness of it all and every twist and turn that led to the failure with your junior team members. They are uniquely dependent on you, and this may lead to substantial stress for them.
Save the rant for people in your network of mentors.
Supporting people at the start of their careers
Team members at the very start of their careers are at particular risk from negative responses to failure. Without years of accrued experience, and let’s face it, practice, every failure can seem like a dream ending disaster. The paper I linked above suggests that fear of failure can lead to imposter syndrome, self-sabotage and further problems, including, at worst, unethical research practices. It’s important, therefore, to leverage your experience to help them contextualise failure, but not to dismiss it. The Oxford Careers Service (who are about to reorganise, so I hope that this link doesn’t disappear immediately) have published the “Overcoming a Sense of Academic Failure” workbook that might be helpful in these situations, both to help you tailor your support and help them work through these critical feelings.
The workbook highlights that a failure is an event, not part of your identity, and acknowledges that failure causes all kinds of negative emotions because it threatens things that are important to us. It encourages researchers to accept and sit with these emotions before getting on with the “productive failure” piece of work. This is important because there’s good evidence (again, discussed in the Edwards paper) that putting on a brave face in response to failure (called “surface acting”) may be at least one reason for the high rates of mental illness and burnout in academia, particularly in women. The workbook encourages researchers to work out what they can control and use these as internal measures of success, as opposed to relying solely on those outside their control, such as grant funding lines and snarky reviewer comments. As a group leader, you can help with this, breaking down what you see as real successes of their work and attitude, and making it clear that this is what you value about your team.
There’s no neat end to this, and speaking as the person who still hasn’t opened their reviewer comments from their rejected MRC Career Development Award application four years ago, I’m equally no expert. Having real interests outside the lab is certainly of help, and you should make sure that your staff aren’t working so hard that they are neglecting the other aspects of their lives. The final thing to be aware of is taking too much of this burden on yourself. It is okay, even better, to direct your team to support if you don’t feel up to the task. In addition to the resources I’ve linked throughout this article, Nature have a Career Guide collection of articles on “How Failure Benefits Science,” and there are loads of practical suggestions and specific examples there of how people have moved past some significant obstacles towards success of all kinds. It’s obvious from reading some of these that each individual failure is different, the feelings each engenders will vary widely, but if we are all more open and a little kinder, we can start to build a research environment where it feels safer to fail.
Dr Becky Carlyle
Author
Dr Becky Carlyle is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford, and has previously worked in the USA. Becky writes about her experiences of starting up a research lab and progressing into a more senior research role. Becky’s research uses mass-spectrometry to quantify thousands of proteins in the brains and biofluids of people with dementia. Her lab is working on various projects, including work to compare brain tissue from people with dementia from Alzheimer’s Disease, to tissue from people who have similar levels of Alzheimer’s Disease pathology but no memory problems. Becky is also a mum, she runs, drinks herbal tea’s and reads lots of books.
Dementia Researcher
Dr Yvonne Couch
Dr Lindsey Sinclair
Dr Becky Carlyle