The Intelligent Fail
You’d think that being the second best _____ in the world would make you the second happiest. Not true! The USA Men’s Gymnastics team medaled at the Olympics for the first time in decades this week, and Olympics fans such as my spouse are ECSTATIC about this fantastic news, the coverage of which has seemed to dwarfs the coverage of many first-place finishes… and the team seems positively thrilled!
Why would this outsize coverage be warranted?
Interestingly, in a typical case, while the silver medalists are the second best in the world at what they do, they take home the bronze in overall satisfaction. Amy Edmondson describes this phenomenon in a section of her new book, The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. Any conductor or artist in a quartet or quintet could benefit from some time investigating her ideas, in which she encourages team to value Intellegent Failure.
The effect I mentioned above has to do with how we frame an issue. A silver-medalist tends to regard silver as a painful failure to win. Meanwhile, a bronze medalist, accepting that they weren’t the best or even next best, is very excited to be on the podium next to the silver and gold.
There’s a lesson in here for musicians who are pushed to their limits, as we work to perfect every musical detail in both performance as well as professionalism. On top of which, we’re asked to present a finely polished public image to the world, whether it’s as the world’s greatest concert pianist, or Texas’ best high school orchestra. But what we all share is a deep knowledge that true perfection is neither possible nor desirable! Failure, in fact, is the price of admission.
The best of us know this. To take just two examples:
Just today, Aubrey Burgauer shared an early career “fail” in her newsletter. And Jennifer Jolley for years documented every single rejection on her composerFAIL Blog.
These are two of my heroes and the type of people that have given me the courage to occasionally open up about my own failures. What they help to show is that, although different applications of intelligent failure require different responses, generally speaking, we want to set the highest possible standards for ourselves and our teams (ensembles, orchestra leadership, section principals, etc.), AND, we want to accept that music is a dynamic system and that a totalizing perfection is not a humane or an admirable goal.
And the very best, even when they don’t often talk about it very explicitly, openly acknowledge that “the show must go on” and even valorize it!
Into the Details
This is all pretty general so far. Let’s get a little more specific. Watch the first section of this video below:
Ray Chen is one of the greatest violinists of his generation, a fun guy to be around, and knows a thing or two about tense situations likely to induce perfectionist tendencies. But notice a quick, almost throwaway line of comment from the opening chapter (“bow fail”) above:
…the difficult part the difficult part is accepting that you just lost $30,000…. losing that much money and then being able to just completely calmly, just go on! That's a lot!!
Kudos to him for doing that, that's absolutely crazy!
Chen is admiring an artist for his immediate ability to accept the reality of the situation—a very expensive equipment failure—and “just go on.”
You might almost call him an imperfectionist.
In his new book, Hidden Potential, Adam Grant not only valorizes this type of radical acceptance, he considers this imperfectionism to be one of the three fundamental character skills that separate elite performers from all the rest. Interestingly, both Grant and Edmondson have appeared together to discuss the challenges of perfectionism when trying to improve teams. Worth a watch!
Quality is an interesting word best saved for another week, but David Camlin writes beautifully about this Quality/Perfection distinction in his study on participatory musical projects as a way to tackle problem of perfectionism in music performance culture in a chapter of The Chamber Musician in the Twenty-First Century. In his results, he describes what I take to be an ideal disposition for music-making: a disposition of freedom..
“freedom from the often debilitating culture of perfectionism; freedom to be oneself, and to be valued as such; and freedom to encounter participants as fellow human beings with diverse and unique personalities, creative aspirations, dreams and ambitions” (p. 66),
A Definition
We have given basic shape to perfectionism and its superior antithesis, the practices of imperfectionists who cultivate a taste for intelligent failure.
But wouldn’t this mean giving into poor performance? Wouldn’t this risk an orchestra, a quartet, or a choir “wallowing in the pool of mediocrity” as my high school band director would say??
Not necessarily. Edmondson makes clear that in order to become a connosieur of intelligent failure, we need to develop our pallet to detect other more undesirable kinds of failure - the preventable, the predictable, and the regrettable. So what makes a failure intelligent? Edmondson gives four characteristics. (Edmondson 2023, p. 53)
The failure takes place in a novel situation.
The context “presents a credible opportunity to advance toward a desired goal.”
Due dilligence (practice, preparation, research, deliberate process, etc.) is undertaken.
The failure is no larger than it has to be.
Bonus: “the failure’s lessons are learned and used to guide next steps.”
I can report that my own desire to hone my craft to the highest level has not been dulled by exposure to the fugitive writings of two of the world’s leading psychologists. But it has helped me to recognize when it makes sense to roll with the punches and when I actually need to give myself or an orchestra “a stern talking-to.” It turns out, the need for stern-ness is pretty rare, but the opportunities for nonjudgemental learning are abundant.
This is a broad idea that could be applied at many levels of music-making. I can see it in rehearsal, programming, and management, to name just three. I’d be interested to know how it’s showing up for you! Drop me a line and let me know.
Meanwhile, just be grateful that your most recent fail probably didn’t require you to play in the rain….