FAILING UPWARDS

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

It has taken a few decades for Samuel Beckett’s obscure aphorism (has anybody actually read Worstward Ho?) to become the stuff of t-shirt slogans, but for all its clichéd status, it expresses a truth. We readily celebrate success, but give little time for its bedfellow, failure. However, as this edition of OT argues, failure is nothing to be ashamed of, but something, if not to celebrate, at least to learn from. OT is not alone in exploring this topic: last year, the journal Nature underlined its belief that negative experimental results were just as important as positive ones by publishing a collection of examples.

As a non-scientist, I have my own take on the value of failure. Like many others, my career has been a litany of setback, interspersed with the occasional success (usually due to other people’s efforts). If the mistakes have become rarer in recent years, it is because I have learned how to avoid my more egregious errors, if only by surrounding myself with people who balance my excesses. Not hiding from them, but staring my failures in the eye to see what I can learn from them is one of the most useful skills I have acquired. Yes, it is the second half of Beckett’s motto that, for me, matters the most – the willingness to take risks and to try again. And that is not just a skill that is difficult for an individual to acquire; it is also one that many organisations struggle to tolerate.

One of the features of government over the past few decades has been the growing intolerance exhibited to those who have failed. Seeing their colleagues publicly cut apart, it is little wonder that so many civil servants do as little as possible to attract attention. Action risks failure and failure leads to punishment; therefore, take no action. It is not to say that all risk is good risk and all failure is honourable failure. Optometry is an evidence-based discipline, and no optometrist is entitled to take cavalier risks with people’s sight. But, like my career, science advances by trial and error. That is the reality which this edition of OT seeks to explore.

553 miles (/ = 0

Adam Sampson, AOP chief executive