Failure is Not An Option
But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.Failure is not an option is the strategy of intentionally ruling out failure. For example, if you are landing an aircraft with 800 passengers on board you may say to yourself -- I can't screw this up right now. This is powerful strategy as there are moments in life where you really do need to perform. However, large organizations with virtually unlimited resources sometimes use failure is not an option as a strategy of ignoring failures that have already occurred such that they try to force things to work by pouring money and resources into them. This can become bizarrely costly and dysfunctional.
― Ernest Hemingway
Resistance to Change
To say goodbye is to die a little.People tend to value stability or view the past as more pleasant than the future such that they resist change. Any change to long standing systems will encounter this type of resistance even if it is clear the established system is failing. For example, a large firm in the 1970s that begins to transition to computerized accounting that faces resistance from accounting teams that claim this is impossible with various logical arguments for why existing processes can't be changed.
― Raymond Chandler
Overinvolvement
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.Those who are immersed in the day to day details of something may become overfocused to the extent that they don't see the bigger picture. For example, a project team that is busy doing work and clearing issues such that nobody performs a sanity check to ask -- does this project make any sense whatsoever?
― Mark Twain
Denial
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.Denial is a coping mechanism whereby powerfully negative emotions are avoided by simply ignoring inconvenient information. This has many flavors such as cherry picking designed to support what you want to believe as opposed to what might be reasonable to believe.
― Mark Twain
Obsessiveness
All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.The obsessive don't care if something is failing they feel compelled to act towards it anyway. There is some line between healthy persistence and dark obsession. One aspect of this line is retaining the ability to judge that your actions remain reasonable.
― Virginia Woolf
Creeping Failure
Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.A failure that occurs slowly such that it is relatively easy to ignore. For example, a city that allows pollution to get slightly worse and worse such that each decline in quality of life isn't dramatic enough to cause much corrective action.
― Lily Tomlin
Singularities
If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.A singularity is a dramatic change that happens instantly at a point in time. For example, a bridge that is stable with 30 tons of vehicles but that suddenly and dramatically fails at 30.0000001 tons. Such a bridge could be a design failure that isn't recognized until the singularity actually occurs.
― Stephen Hawking
Pyrrhic Victory
There are many victories worse than a defeat.A pyrrhic victory is an initial victory that ultimately leads to your defeat. For example, an ambitious software developer who successfully outcompetes their peers to get a promotion into a role in which they are completely incompetent such that they are ultimately let go.
― George Eliot
Trough of Sorrow
When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.The trough of sorrow is a long period of poor results that often occurs when you are working on something big. In this period you will be misunderstood as a failure when in fact you may be on the verge of a large scale success. Identifying the difference between true failure and the trough of sorrow can be extremely difficult as little data is available in the trough of sorrow such that one has to know they are doing the right thing based on first principles.
― Walt Disney
| Overview: Failure To Recognize Failure | ||
Type | ||
Definition | The continuation of a strategy, investment and effort that will ultimately fail to produce expected results. | |
Related Concepts | ||
