Personal Failure Modes

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The Uses of Failure

Failure is an odd experience. It may be anticipated but is usually unexpected; it leaves a sting but, in hindsight, it sometimes clears the ground for something better.

I have had enough encounters with it to know its habits.

An early example came in 1977, when I decided to escape teaching and try my hand at computing. Jacob’s Biscuits - yes, the biscuit people - set me a written test in flowcharts and algorithms: I had never seen such contraptions before. Grappling against time with these weird algorithmic mazes, I missed the cut-off by a single mark.

No job.

At the time, I was furious: to fail on something so arbitrary, a contrived mess of boxes and arrows. Yet within months I was enrolled at KBS Computer Services on a COBOL programming course, which launched me into employment.

Jacob’s biscuits continued to crumble without my assistance.

A few years later, I was employed as an Assembler programmer at Kienzle Data Systems in Slough but looking for something better. ICL in Bracknell seemed promising (they later became a scandal-prone Fujitsu). By then I did have real credentials - Assembler and COBOL - but I was also married, in debt, and carrying a large monetary loan from Kienzle.

During my interview in Bracknell I asked - perhaps unwisely - whether ICL might extend a similar multi-thousand pound loan as a condition of the great benefits of employing me. 

They declined to offer me the job; in retrospect such a narrow escape. ICL slid into Fujitsu’s embrace and lost any claim to distinction, while I moved on to Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL), where I discovered software research and artificial intelligence and launched my career at a much higher level.

STL was taken over by BNR, and then absorbed into Northern Telecom, where my fortunes went up and down. At some point - wearied by Nortel - I went down to the south coast to interview with Ericsson, a telecoms competitor. I took the train, endured the hopeful anxiety of another corporate audition, and was duly rejected.

In the aftermath I struck out as a freelance telecoms designer, trading security for autonomy. This was Interweave Consulting. The work flowed in, the money was much better than anything Ericsson would have paid, and for the first time I felt I owned what I did. And Ericsson flailed in the early 2000s when the boom times ended, a casualty of the new Internet technologies.

Years later, when my own company faltered for a while, I applied to a consultancy in Cambridge (Analysys) that recruited through written intelligence tests. Pass them all or be shown the door. I stumbled on the linguistic puzzles - the to-me contrived “if this, then not that” variety - where success depends more on second-guessing the test-setter’s intent than on actual reasoning.

I failed one section, which meant I failed altogether. They had no further interest in me, my phone call seeking feedback was met with disdainful indifference. In the event, my own firm, Interweave Consulting, soon revived, and I was spared the grind of corporate clever-for-hire left-brain consultancy.

Not every failure involved trying to get in. Sometimes it was about maintaining that superior consultant-mode once inside. At Salford Quays, presenting to a client on a network design for them, on behalf of the project management company I was working with, I was blindsided by detailed questions about Cisco routers. My work had always been at the generic architectural level - designs and functions - not the details of any specific vendor’s catalogue. I really did not know Cisco's detailed product line.

In that moment I was exposed. I bluffed, floundered, and later phoned colleagues in embarrassment, asking with demeaning desperation for assistance. The project was unaffected, I got away with it, but the memory of standing there, empty-handed before the client, still has its edge. I really hate being incompetent in the moment.

What unites these episodes is not that I was right and everybody else was wrong. Each organization I dealt with was acting within its own terms: Jacob’s with its early-days flowcharts, ICL with its financial probity and commodity view of programmers, Ericsson with its bureaucratic tick-boxes, Cambridge with its sui generis puzzles, Salford with its vendor-router queries. Their standards were real; my shortcomings were real. The mismatch was structural.

Failure, then, is very ordinary. It is what happens when two sets of requirements don’t line up. The shock comes from the body, which still registers rejection as horrible; that visceral jolt is what remains in the memory. Yet, looking back, each rejection actually cleared a path. The failures kept me moving until I arrived at places better suited to what I could actually do.

Failure does not define; it diverts and redirects. And often, the door that shuts on you - it turns out in hindsight - is the very one you should not have wished to walk through.