What Engineers Can Learn from Authors
Google X’s self-congratulatory embrace of “failure” ignores lessons that have served writers and artists well for millennia
I recently listened to a segment on NPR’s Marketplace from 2015 that gave airtime to a positively gushing member of the 21st century financial success story and civilization-defining enterprise that is Google.
Astro Teller (his real name? not sure) directs Google X, a semi-secret public relations stunt that is not quite so secret that its director cannot appear on national radio. It claims to “create radical new technologies to solve some of the world’s hardest problems.” On the show, Teller didn’t so much reveal Google X’s secrets as he did reveal, with breathless enthusiasm, the utterly banal method by which he and his colleagues achieve so much innovation.
It turns out, contrary to all conceivable preconceptions about Google, that the key to Teller’s success is none other than failure. As if describing his discovery of cold fusion or the passage of the Turing test, Teller explained that Google X researchers are not only permitted to fail but, indeed, encouraged to do so. If they can imagine some thingamajig, widget, or applet that doesn’t yet exist but ought to, away they go to the workbench and the keyboard to figure out how in the heck it can be brought into this world.
Build one that doesn’t work? No worries. Build another. Strike two? Take another swing. Strike three…. then maybe we need to talk. At some point, this cycle of trial and error results in the next Alexa — or in the next Ask Jeeves. Either way, it’s all good. Failure is encouraged. The more Google X fails, the closer it gets to achieving its mission.
I imagine researchers proudly adding buttons, like TGI Friday’s flair, for every project that goes pear-shaped. Think of it: under Teller’s watch, failure is OK. Wow, man, that’s really big of you.
While this epiphany must have stunned techies and laypeople alike into a fit of admiration (why else would Google permit the interview?), I can imagine a type of heretical contrarian who responded to that story with a monumental roll of the eyes: every person who has ever successfully, or even aspirationally, called him- or herself a writer.
Writers might not be able to put a dog nose on your selfie or steal your personal data and sell it to Russia, but they do know a thing or two about failure. Pretty much everything that has ever appeared in print started out as a failure. The first draft of Hamlet? Failure. The first draft of Mrs. Dalloway? Catastrophic. The first draft of Gone with the Wind? The worst. The first draft of Cloud Atlas? In the toilet. The first draft of Atlas Shrugged? Terrifying. (Same for the final draft.)
The general rule in writing is that every draft is a failure until a writer has failed so much that he or she cannot fail any more. Storylines get reconsidered. Logic gets tightened. Themes get more nuanced. Diction improves. Analysis sharpens. The proverbial trash can fills up and eventually the writer comes up with something that’s not a complete embarrassment. This principle applies as much to newspaper articles, opinion pieces, college essays, and limericks as it does to novels, scripts, and epic poems.
Literally every writer knows this. It’s not a secret — it’s not like we’re a shady fraternity of people who take failure in stride. Anne Lamott put it particularly eloquently in her chapter entitled “Sh---y First Drafts,” which discusses exactly what its title implies.
The thing is, writing is subjective. It doesn’t have a right or wrong answer. It doesn’t have a specific function. It does not charge unblinking into the future. Writing — which encompasses themes, ideas, narratives, and knowledge as well as rhetoric and style — is simply as good as a writer (and editors) can make it. Writing means settling, eventually, on one of the infinite combinations of words that will suffice for the task at hand. There is no optimizing. There is no goal to achieve.
The centrality of failure is not just a principle of writing, at least it shouldn’t be. Every subjective or creative endeavor involves just the sort of endemic failure rate that I’m describing. Painters tear up their canvases. Photographers delete images. Musicians erase recordings. And, unlike tech whizzes, the better artists are, the less bothered they are by the rubbish they create.
(I’m not claiming that writers and artists can’t learn from tech and business too. We can all learn from each other. I just haven’t heard any writers go on the radio to congratulate themselves for discovering the principle of Six-Sigma.)
I see no reason why this principle shouldn’t extend to programmers, engineers, and everyone else short of doctors and airline pilots. What’s amazing about Google X is that there’s a whole industry of people who, having been trained in engineering and enslaved by the riches of venture capital, do not understand this most elementary principle. Schooled in the supposedly scientific methods of engineering, they drive only toward success. Sometimes, tech companies are so afraid of failure that they try to define their own successes. Theranos comes to mind. So does Uber, absent any attempt to win regulatory permission to operate. How’s that Snapchat stock doing?
Google X’s discovery of failure, as if it were a dead language revived by monks and translated for a grateful world, speaks not so much to the cleverness of Teller and his engineers as it does to the arrogance that infects Silicon Valley. It’s a humblebrag of the highest order, implying that nobody in regular Google ever fails. If failure is to be admired — for its innovation and its bravery — it’s only because success is typically assumed to be a foregone conclusion.
The tech world has made a point of disparaging, or at least ignoring, any disciplines it sees as soft or superfluous. The electronic or automated version of anything — mail, shopping, delivery, spelling — is assumed to be an improvement on its analog counterpart. Sorry, it’s not. The imperfection of analog matters just as much as the supposed precision of digital.
The nod to the “arts” implied by the acronym “STEAM” is nothing short of condescending. The subjectivity and ambiguity that lie at the heart of the humanities — and of writing — are not curious appendages. They are central to the human experience and, by extension, to the business experience. That experience involves failure: not denying it or bragging about it but, rather, accepting it as a matter of course.
A open letter to Teller: You clearly have failure in your office. But the projects aren’t the failures, and neither are the people. Any company or industry so oblivious to the nature of failure isn’t committing failure. It is the failure.
