When Liz Beattie, a retired teacher, recently tried to persuade The Professional Association of Teachers to delete the word failure from the educational vocabulary and replace it with the term deferred success, it attracted widespread ridicule. She maintained that repeated failure at exams could damage a pupil’s interest in learning. As it turned out, Liz Beattie’s success was deferred; her proposal was rejected.

I must admit that when I read about this proposal, my initial reaction was that Beattie’s argument was an absurd cop out – rather like those attempts to banish competition on school sports days, or to refer to highly traumatic events, such as death, by retreating into euphemisms (such as departed or passed away). However, it set me thinking about the whole business of treating mistakes and failures as learning opportunities.

Liz Beattie, it seemed to me, wasn’t suggesting ignoring the realities of failure, but was suggesting that schools treat failure as an opportunity to learn and improve. I imagine that if she had been my teacher, my school days might have been transformed. She might have helped me to see my failures as an inevitable part of a process that, handled well, would eventually lead to success. Instead of learning to fear failure, and to minimise it by playing safe, I might have learned how to pick myself up, modify my approach and have another go. These would have been invaluable life skills, but, alas, in common with most of us, I had to acquire them long after I had left school.

Failures are intrinsically far more interesting and memorable than successes. Whenever I ask people to give me examples of learning from experience, they invariably cite a mishap, mistake or failure. No wonder experiential learning is often referred to as the school of hard knocks! In my experience, it is much easier to learn from failure than success. When an outcome matches or exceeds our expectations, we let out a whoop of joy and continue on with much the same behaviours and actions as before. By contrast, when an outcome fails to live up to expectations, we are more likely to try something different to avoid repeating the failure. The realisation that we need to change our approach key, and is the point at which learning comes to the rescue.

It isn’t failure itself that is interesting, so much as our reactions to it. I have always been fascinated by the way some people have their spirits broken by setbacks and failures while other people rise to the occasion and persevere against what, at the time, must seem like hopeless odds.

Thomas Edison’s two-year struggle to get his experimental light bulbs to work is both a good and bad example of perseverance. He started out, in the summer of 1878, boasting that he would crack the problem in just a few weeks. Apparently, Edison was a ‘try again’ inventor - when a prototype didn’t work, he’d simply throw it away and try again in an unselective, ‘hit and miss’ sort of way.

By November, Edison was forced to admit that his bulbs didn’t work and that he needed a new approach. He hired a young physicist, Francis Upton, who introduced the sort of scientific discipline that Edison lacked. To his credit, Edison called a halt to the frenetic experimental process, while Upton and his associates concentrated on learning everything they could from old patents and the experiences of other inventors that had previously worked on the problem. It was this discipline that eventually led to the breakthrough – using a carbon filament in a vacuum.

Interestingly, no fewer than 13 inventors, over a 30-year period, had previously experimented with carbon. Blind perseverance wasn’t the answer; it was the search for a new line of attack and learning from other people’s failures that did the trick.

Thomas Edison himself said, ‘If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is often a step forward’. I’m hesitant to contradict Edison, but of course, he had failed. In fact, he had failed 10,000 times – and I bet, despite his denials, often felt discouraged – but he didn’t give up. Edison behaved as if each failure was merely a temporary delay on the way to success – exactly what Liz Beattie wanted to call deferred success. Had he been afraid to fail, he would have become risk-averse and his perseverance would have been sapped. This, by the way, would have been very good news for Joseph Swan, an English chemist, who claimed to have invented a similar lamp 15 years before Edison!

Failures, like most things in life, fall into different categories. There are those that say, ‘You are on a hiding to nothing, give up and do something completely different’. Others say, ‘Stop, reflect and try a different approach’. Still others say, ‘You can’t do this on your own – seek assistance’. Edison’s early failures were clearly a combination of the latter two. The whole point of failure is to acknowledge the message to stop, reflect and decide what to do differently. There can be no innovation and experimentation without failure.

Far from deleting failure from our vocabulary, we need to recognise its inevitability, and help people to see how it can be used as a learning opportunity. As Henry Ford said, ‘Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently’.

Dr Peter Honey, FRSA,FCIPD, FIMC is a Chartered Psychologist and founder of Peter Honey Publications. He can be contacted on +44 (0) 1628 633946, at peterhoney@peterhoney.com or visit www.peterhoney.com

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