Stephen Webster 00:05
I’m Dr. Stephen Webster, director of the Good Science Project at Imperial, a programme that examines what we like about research culture, and what we don’t.
And in episode three of Failure in Science, a podcast series about how to do science better, we explore failure and institutions.
Yes, we all have our personal failures, our bad times.
But what if it is actually our institutions that are failing us?
What if a rigid system of education is stifling our imagination?
What if the hunt for grants makes us play safe and narrows our thinking?
Isn’t that failure too?
Jem Woods, who’s a professor at Imperial College London, opened the Failure in Science conference in April with a quote from Albert Einstein:
Jem Woods 01:02
The quote is, “As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it. And we have to continue to keep on thinking around and being critically reflective on that uncertainty and the parameters of that uncertainty and how we perceive what we know and what we don’t know.”
And I think that sits at the heart of the failure in science questions.
Mary Ryan 01:35
Yes, I’m Mary Ryan. I’m the Vice Provost for Research and Enterprise at Imperial College London, and I’m the Armourers and Brasiers’ Chair for material science.
So what would I say my big failures are? When you see someone who’s clearly, you know, a successful academic?
You know, I have a research group at Imperial College, so in some ways, I’ve been very successful.
And I think it’s hard, particularly for early career researchers, to see people who have you know, quotes, “made it,” reflecting that they had failures.
So I think actually it’s really important that we talk about things that we weren’t successful at.
Every academic has got a folder on their computer of proposals that were rejected, papers that were rejected for one reason or other.
That doesn’t mean those ideas weren’t worthy or valuable.
Some of them were before their time.
Some of them weren’t fully developed.
Some of them were bad, and we had to be told they were bad.
But how you respond to that rejection? I think failure and rejection are intimately entwined, right?
And that shapes who you are as a scientist, actually, how, that you get them, but how you respond to them.
But there are many times where you do an experiment with a certain focus, and that experiment itself might fail, or you miss something in the background.
Famously, in the 1980s and early 90s, everybody that was working on surface science STM. Many surface science approaches would use highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) as a standard substrate.
To make your surface clean, what we did, we’d use a piece of tape. We cleave the surface because graphite cleaves very nicely, as we know.
For about 10 years, literally thousands of people were throwing away bits of graphene on their Sellotape because we were focused on the surface and not what we’d done to clean the surface.
And of course the discovery of graphene using exactly that technique was awarded the Nobel Prize.
And I think that’s just a really interesting reflection that you can be doing a certain piece of work and that is successful, but sometimes you’ve also thrown away what was important.
I think that’s a metaphor for life, probably. By focusing on one thing, you throw away what’s really important.
So at the conference, Professor Jem Woods quoted Einstein’s discussion around the kind of, the circumference of knowledge and what is known and what is not known.
And it’s really challenging from an educational training perspective to get that balance of supporting students to understand what we know, but also understanding that there’s uncertainty at the boundaries of that knowledge.
It’s challenging because that makes assessment more difficult. And there’s a large degree of assessment built into how we teach and train and educate people.
But it’s difficult because it becomes very uncomfortable for both the educator and the student to deal with a space where we just don’t know.
Now, I actually think it’s a brilliant opportunity for thinking about how we design education to really put some of those challenging questions into the hands and minds of students, because I think it’s when there are “What are the big questions of the universe?”
You know, they’ve inspired people for generations. And we’ve still got them.
There’s a danger that we now treat education and knowledge as complete when it’s not. And that means that you’re probably not lighting some of those sparks that we’ve seen before.
I think it’s also really, really important that in a space where knowledge is also increasingly captured and categorized by AI, that there’s a real understanding of people that we train that we don’t have the sum total of knowledge.
We don’t know everything. There’s still uncertainties. There’s still questions.
So you’ve also got to question (when you interact with frontier technology) about what if the knowledge you are being told, what knowledge it has been trained on, what is the boundary of that knowledge as well?
So all of those things mean we have to, I think, bring it further into the centre, what is unknown, before we build on what we do know.
Jem Woods 05:54
So science is founded on experimentation and with the risk of failure fundamentally at its core.
I’m really, curious, I guess, about the balance between applied science and curiosity-driven, sometimes called fundamental science.
And yet, I wonder, aren’t we all curious? And isn’t it that we all want to be curious?
Isn’t that what drives experimentation and testing and knowledge and knowledge generation?
We’re constantly thinking about narrowing our boundaries.
How do we set our boundaries? And yet, we should always be thinking about how we expand our boundaries, how we remain curious.
Mary Ryan 06:37
Professor Jem Woods made an interesting point at the conference around expanding knowledge and this kind, a bit of a tension between discovery, applied science, and how we think about experimentation in that space.
One of the things I like to just try to take everything back to is when you’re thinking about science and applied science, what are the questions you are asking?
Are you asking a why question? Are you asking a what question? Are you asking a how question?
Because that sort of shapes what kind of an experiment you would design and think about.
If you were to take a, you know, a big step back and think about you know pushing the boundary of discovery science, which are often why questions.
And you have a hypothesis or an idea about you know what the answer is to the why, you should always design your experiment to disprove that hypothesis, right?
That’s the way that science actually progresses.
So you should be designing experiments in some ways that fail, right?
Because you’re testing to get to disprove a hypothesis.
I feel like we’ve lost a little bit of that because those experiments are hard to do. They’re hard to think about. They’re hard to publish.
And so what are the mechanisms, by the way, we capture those disproving of hypotheses as really parts of contribution to knowledge.
Because they narrow down what are the right answers and what are the right ways forward.
I still think we need to make sure we capture that as a really fundamental part of the scientific method when we’re doing our training of students.
But quite often, if you want to really, but again, push the boundaries of what you’re going to be able to deliver, you have to work out where those boundaries are, right?
So you have to get to the point where something doesn’t work to understand what does work.
And I think all of those are places where you start to see, and I’m slightly using works and doesn’t work as a failure version, which is not quite the same.
But I think it’s important that you get to the point when you’ve pushed it as far as you can, the frontier of discovery or applied science.
Roseanne 08:40
I’m Roseanne. So I’ve been at Imperial for around four years now.
So I think the failure in education session was very relevant to me because I’ve lived it.
So what I really thought was quite inquisitive was this tension between systemic and individual failure, and how the system might, kind of, create individual failure, but then individual failure can kind of symbolize this systemic failure too.
But I felt that what was really important was to make known to students that failure always carries loads of weight and symbolism within our day-to-day lives, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve failed.
Mary Ryan 09:17
So during the final plenary session, Rosanne I think, fed back on the failure in education.
And she talked really interestingly about the difference between systemic and individual failures.
Roseanne 09:27
And I feel like the failure in education discussion really symbolized this first step towards acknowledging, number one, that education is kind of underpinned by inequalities.
That means that other people might not have the right science capital or kind of social capital to mean that we all carry the same equal understanding of science, and that means that we need to bridge these gaps.
But also at the same time that we need to fulfill students with confidence to be able to, not fail, but to make mistakes that result in improving and acknowledging that failure isn’t failure as we like to symbolize it, but how it drives you towards creating….
Mary Ryan 10:05
One thing that really resonated with me and what she was talking about was this idea that at an individual level, the impact of failure is not equally felt.
And the likelihood of failure is not equal, depending on your social capital, your background, the disparity that we have in educational inputs, and the disparity that failure or perceived failure has on your educational outputs, and your life chances.
And this is a really big challenge for all of us, I think, to deal with as a society and as an education community, how do we level that playing field on the way in, and make sure that we are enabling the brightest people, wherever they come from, with a background, to be able to have an equal chance of success?
But then also on the other side of that, some people are allowed to fail, and still succeed, right? And we know we all recognize that in life. We all have experiences of that.
One of the things I think this is it really incumbent on educational establishments is to think about building resilience.
Right, building resilience in our students so they don’t feel that a single failure of a single exam is a reflection on the totality of what they bring, on their talent and their knowledge and what they’ve been learning.
That actually, it’s seen as a space for increased learning, a space to reflect and go back and say, “Actually I can do better.”
Of course, we live and our systems, I think it’s where it comes to the systemic part. Our systems are built on a, you know, pass fail first two one.
And I think what we need to reflect a little bit on is how we talk about that.
I mean, I think you know I am I am still a believer that we need to train people to the highest level they can, and we need to say that we are bringing the brightest and the best, and giving them as the best education they can, in order that they can go on and change the world, right?
That’s what we are trying to do.
But how do we say within this pool of people, everybody is valuable, and everybody’s contribution is valuable, and your output is going to go on and make a difference.
I guess thinking about why it’s important that we actually embrace the idea of failure has got many, many different reasons in it within a university and education context.
One is, I think, the perception of what success looks like for an early career researcher.
There is still a lingering, if you start off doing research, the ultimate endpoint view is to be an academic professor.
We know the likelihood of that is probably about 5%.
But also we know they’re not necessarily the most impactful jobs, right?
And so one thing that we’ve been doing at Imperial is establishing a new research institute for early career researchers that helps them see multiple pathways.
So what does it look like to have a job in industry? What does it look like to work in policy? To work in publishing? To work in the public sector?
And then think about what are the steps that might get you to those kind of careers very early on, not as a second choice, but as actually “That’s my north star from day one. This is what I want to do with my research.”
And that’s an important reset on expectations and the expectations that you give yourself and the expectations that we, as an organization, give to early career researchers that are here.
The other area I think is really important is on innovation and entrepreneurship.
Those are inherently areas that are high risk.
They should be high risk, and they should be, you know, we talk about failing fast.
What we also find is that when you’re in an academic culture, students don’t like to fail.
You know, you don’t want to fail an exam, you don’t want to fail a test.
So, what we’ve done with our entrepreneurship for our undergraduate programme, we’ve set that up through an entity we call the Enterprise Lab.
We have programmes that train students to think about entrepreneurship, how to bring an idea and turn it into a device or a company.
We link them to entrepreneurs outside of the university.
We’ve got some mentors for them.
We run many programmes and competitions.
All of that is deliberately extracurricular, right? So it’s not counted for credit.
They can come in, they can explore their ideas. They can be stupid ideas. They can be brilliant ideas.
But they’re not in a framework where someone’s going to give them an A or a B or a C. They’re going to say, “Did I make a company? Did I not make a company? Did I decide I want to do that? I didn’t want to do that.”
And so it completely changes the culture of how they. Approach that activity, and that’s really important for it to be almost like a safe space to fail.
Or almost a place where failing is one of the positive outcomes because you’ve done something that was disruptive and it didn’t work, and that’s a good outcome.
And now you take that and you take it back to somewhere else.
So creating that culture of, you know, have an idea, try something, fail fast. No consequences other than you learnt something, right?
It’s a really important part of how we think about entrepreneurship.
What are the systems questions around innovation spinouts and failure?
People often point to the to the Bay Area, the US, as being this hotbed of innovation, and one of the reasons for that is you can very easily be a serial startup creator, and you have a startup then it fails, and a startup then it fails.
And in fact, when you talk to entrepreneurs in the Bay Area, one of the first things they tell you is the three companies that they had that failed.
That doesn’t preclude them starting a new one and getting funding for it, whereas I think in the UK and probably in Europe in general, there’s more of a requirement for a track record.
So people who have had multiple startups, typically they’ve all succeeded, right?
And so it’s this difference between at a systems level, how you perceive that failure as being “Well, this is my only one chance, so I’ve got to make it work,“ versus, “I’m going to try three or four times until that one works.”
We have to shift that dynamic if the rest of the world is going to catch up with what’s happening in the US.
That means a few things. It means probably more venture capital, venture capital is able to take more risk, but also again that resilience in our individuals.
That if this one thing doesn’t work, they should try again and try again.
