On a Thursday afternoon in April 2023, SpaceX attempted to launch for the first time its massive new “Starship” rocket, its most powerful launch vehicle as of that date. The term “attempted” being critical, as only 4 minutes after the rocket has departed the launching pad, it started tumbling mid-air. This led to the vehicle’s self-destruct system being triggered, resulting in the rocket being rendered to millions of tiny pieces and a puff of smoke.
If you read the stories in the media about it, they would have left you very confused. To some it was was an incredible failure, a screw-up; “Starship” didn’t make it to orbit, and millions of dollars of invested capital turned into dust scattered across the Gulf of Mexico.
Others, however, viewed this as a tremendous success, a moment that will go down in the pages of history as a milestone in Humankind’s journey to becoming a multi-planetary species.
So who is right, and what can we learn from that about failure?
Contextualizing Success
When you compare how a company like SpaceX operates when building a space vehicle to NASA for example, there are obvious similarities but also stark differences.
The goal, on its surface at least, is usually the same - get this piece of metal and everything on it to its designated place in space, do what you need to do, and maybe even get most of it back to earth in one piece. Simple, straightforward.
However the way the two intend on getting there, is anything but the same.
At NASA every launch and every space vehicle is precious, both literally and figuratively. A rocket might take a decade to develop and see the launching pad. During that time it will undergo any type of test or validation you can imagine that can be done while still on our earthly ground. All of those done with a single thought it mind - Once this piece of metal is space-bound, it better damn make it on the first flight.
At SpaceX on the other hand, from day one they worked on making their rockets relatively cheap. They didn’t do it just to make themselves commercially viable and ensure good long term margins, but also to make fast iteration feasible.
While at NASA they would spend years on perfecting a single rocket, at SpaceX they had built a fleet of vehicles, all made with one primary goal - Fast and iterative improvements based on real world learnings, trial and error.
So while the goal of both might be similar - putting this piece of metal and everything on it in space - their true definition of success and way of getting there is inherently very different.
The way success is contextualized very much defines not only how things will end up being done, but also the culture, what is celebrated, what is mundane, and what is considered a failure.
Contextualizing Failure
The way we contextualize failures, usually very much depends on the way we define successes.
If there’s only one outcome which we can define as a success, and that outcome will only come at the end of the road of something we’ve been working on for a long time - We’ve inherently turned success and failure to be boolean. Either you succeeded or you failed. Success is good and failure can be nothing other than bad, as it’s the only outcome at an end of a road, somewhat like a zero-sum game.
However, things can be structured in such a way that both success and failure are by design incremental. Goals can be built of many sequential milestones, all of which have several success criteria. A failure along the way can be a learning opportunity or even a goal by itself on our way to the next incremental success. By doing so we’ve inherently recontextualized failure.
At SpaceX they have chosen to take a note from the world of software engineering and work based on the “Spiral development” model.
That means they work in a continuous iterative loop of conceptualizing goals, identifying risks, fixing, building, testing, learning, and planning for the next goals.
Doing so have contextualized incremental success and failure as part of their way of work and helped foster a culture of continuous improvement. Their engineers know that some of the best lessons are learned in the air and not on the ground, and that blowing up a rocket worth several millions of dollars will (hopefully) return itself in invaluable data and information for them to make the next one better.
That is why, while many people were witnessing with shock and awe the marvelous explosion and puff of smoke painting the sky over the Gulf of Mexico, thinking this might be the end of the dream touted by Elon Musk. The engineers at Space X were cheering and sharing high fives. To them the context of this failure was different.
Not Letting a Good Failure Go to Waste
Simply embracing failures on the other hand, is really not a good goal on it’s own.
For the uninitiated, some if this might read as if we should assume failure from the get-go, lower our expectations of things and eventually bask in the glory of a failure as it manifests exactly as we have expected.
But in reality the opposite should really be the case.
This iteration of “Starship” did not simply blow-up “as expected”, it was not built to fail - It was built to maximize success and learn from failure if one was to happen. There were many incremental success criteria, the first one simply being able to leave the launch pad. Some of those success criteria were met and some did not. The team was able to celebrate the successes which were achieved, while also looking forward to improve based on the learnings from the data behind the failures.
For failures to be tolerable or even valuable, having them happen in the correct context is important, but not enough.
The ability to define complex success criteria in an incremental and iterative manner, is what makes failure tolerable. As the gravity of a single failure decreases in comparison to the greater picture of achievements and future goals.
In tandem with that, the act of continuous learning through retrospectives, as well as our ability to draw the team’s horizon from those failures, is what make failures valuable. As the team is being fueled and incrementally wiser by each and every failure.
Leveraging these principals and using them to mold how you operate as a team, how you set goals and how you respond when things don’t go the way you planned - These are the keys for getting the most value out of your failures.
While most of us don’t spend our day to day contemplating how to get people to colonize Mars, there’s many things that we can learn from “Starship” on how to celebrate our failures.
Building the culture and practices that maximize the value of failures, is an important step for creating winning teams that can get the best out of any situation and eventually eclipse others in the long run.
First published on Medium, 22 April 2023.