The Audacity of Failure

“3, 2, 1, Go!” 

It was another round of game-play in the 2019 FIRST Robotics Bayou Regional in Kenner, Louisiana. Five 120 pound robots barreled across a field that looked like a child’s dream of the Planet Mars and an 8-bit video game towards their goals; shooting balls into holes and hanging flat disks onto Velcro.

Meanwhile, sitting forlornly against the rear wall, one of the robots didn’t move. Again. For the third game in a row.

Acting as the Emcee of a Robotics Competition is perhaps one of the most exciting activities that I do each year. I love interacting with the students, watching as their robots achieve all the things that they had planned. I love introducing each school and listening to the roar of their team in the crowd. Most of all, I love knowing that I am seeing students who will eventually take what they are learning to professional fields across the world. 

What I don’t enjoy is when, as the coach of a FIRST Robotics team myself, my team faces disappointment after disappointment as our robot refuses to move on the field. We had, after all, worked for nearly two months on this bot. Blood and tears, sleep and sweat, and most importantly hundreds of hours of valuable time had been given into this collection of metal, gears, and electronics. Now? It seemed nothing more than a giant paperweight.

After the match, the drive-team collected the bot and trudged back to our pit, their disappointment evident on their faces. This isn’t the first time they’ve seen difficulty, but it is the first time that they’ve seen a complete failure of their design. Nothing seemed to work. The wheels wouldn’t spin properly, some ill-interpreted construction rules had meant we needed to redesign entire sections of the bot, even the ‘brain’ of the robot seemed to be sluggish and not responding to computer commands.

For those that know high-school students, this could have easily been the death knell of our weekend. As a teacher, I’ve often seen the effects that failure can have on a team of students. They want to shut down. To walk away. They want to take their toys, go home, and relax in front of their favorite gaming system avoiding the idea that they didn’t do something right. Call it perfectionism, call it a lack of grit – it’s unavoidably one of the most difficult issues to deal with in the classroom.

Instead, time after time, I would check in on them to find a group huddled over the bot working with event volunteers, members of other teams, and anyone else they could find to troubleshoot and fix the problems. Lunch? Optional. A break? A waste of time. They tried dozens of things to fix the problems and while some of it made minor progress, there was no miracle cure.

By the end of the matches on Friday, with Saturday’s qualification and playoff matches still looming, they had only just realized that the largest issue lied with a bad computer. The whole thing had to be changed out and then reformatted to be ready to play. While I would like to say that we had regional changing matches on Saturday, I can only say that our bot was able to move on the field and gave us solace as it accomplished a few of the tasks that we had set out to do.

But still, the team worked. Even after we knew we hadn’t made it into the Playoffs, our team refused to pack up the bot and get ready for home. They continued to work, reveling in the success of getting one mechanism to work after the other. They cheered for themselves in the pit when our claw successfully picked up a piece of cargo and they called me back and forth after each accomplishment to see their progress.

As the final matches were being played on the field, my team’s final matches were being played in a mostly empty conference arena where many of the teams had already packed to leave. And as I’ve reflected on this whole experience I’ve been left with a few key thoughts.

1. Failure to launch is not the same as failing to succeed. As mentors, we often need to provide safety nets to guard those who are training. Eventually, though, we must remove them and watch as our charges either falter or fly. Sometimes, the fall is the only thing that inspires them to greatness. Often, the rise from that fall forges entirely new people.  
2. Allowing for failure is audacious. It provides us with the opportunity to reset, rebuild, and rise to new levels. Response to failure is not something that is inbuilt from birth. It is honed through experience and often these experiences determine whether we will flee from failure or dig into it until we understand it, have processed it, and have developed success through it.
3. Unprocessed failure is a defeat. Analyzed failure is a victory. It is easy to generalize failure. In the case of our robotics team, it would have been easy to look at the issues that arose with the robot and see, in general, a faulty design. Pack it away, try again next year. Instead, our build team broke everything down into its simplest parts. They judged each individual action that happened as something to be analyzed, worked through, and repaired. Instead of failure becoming a giant monster that devoured, failure revealed itself as small, individual tasks that could be corrected.

I am a coach. Sure, I coach students who are building giant robots, but I am still a coach. I often see things in terms of victories and defeats. When I return to school after a competition, I feel the weight of wanting to have a successful program and that success is usually demonstrated through our win/loss record.

This time, though, I’ve been spinning a different narrative. When I tell people of the student who was living off cough drops and Advil but still digging into the wiring of our bot to make it work; I tell of the audacity of failure. When I tell them of the student who talked with every team that they could to glean advice so the problems we had would never happen again; I tell of the audacity of failure.

We rarely learn through our success. These intangible moments where everything goes right, and we see things through the fuzzy filter of adrenaline and hope, joy and excitement. I can remember, though, every small thing that went wrong with our robot at the Bayou Regional. So can my team. And as we work to make sure the bot is ready for our next competition these things will guide us more than a trophy ever could.