How to Succeed at Failing, Part 1: The Chain of Events

We tend to think of tragedies as a single terrible moment, rather than the result of multiple bad decisions. Can this pattern be reversed?

In August of 2023, on a Monday morning, the National Weather Service issued a warning of high winds in Maui County, Hawaii. By the next morning, the wind was gusting at over 70 miles an hour. The island started to lose electricity, and near the town of Lahaina there was a brush fire. Firefighters arrived, and the fire was declared contained — but later that day, the winds caused a flare-up. You probably read about what happened next, or saw it in horrifying videos and news coverage: The town of Lahaina was swallowed by fire. People tried to flee in their cars, but the roads were clogged. Some people jumped in the ocean to escape. By the time the fire was out, 102 people had died and more than 2,000 buildings had been destroyed, most of them homes.

Hawaii has a robust emergency-warning system, but the system appears to have failed during the wildfires. Nor was that the only failure: Government investigators later found that a fallen power line had been mistakenly reenergized; this ignited a gully full of dry grass that should have been trimmed.

I spoke with Ed Galea about the Lahaina fire. He's director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich, in London. He studies how people react to disasters. He said that a given failure is rarely about a single tragic moment.

It’s a chain of events. Failure to notify people early enough, failure for the people to respond to the call, failure for the people to have a plan as to what they’re going to do during an evacuation. It’s not just fire where a lot of this is relevant. We look at marauding armed shooters, or the event in South Korea where there were a number of young people crushed to death in a narrow street. It’s always distressing to look at a new event, especially events that were predictable and preventable.

Most of us don't think of marauding armed shooters, or people being crushed by crowds, as “predictable and preventable." We tend to use the word “tragedy” to describe these kinds of events. But what do you call a tragedy that was predictable and preventable? You call that a failure.

A failure — any kind of failure — can have any number of causes. And any number of consequences, too: embarrassment, shame, anger, pain, financial loss, loss of reputation, loss of life. There are public failures and private failures, each of them costly in their own ways. And of course there’s the fear of failure, and the fear of being seen to have failed.

All these costs mean that sometimes we don’t even try — and what’s the cost of that? Or we try to hide our failures — which means denying everyone else what might have been a helpful example. Given how long we humans have been failing, you might think we’d be good at managing it and learning from it. But my argument is that ... we’re not. Most of us don’t think about failure as a chain of events. Most of us get angry, or frustrated, and we go looking for someone to blame.

I’m sure you’ve heard people say that failure is a great teacher — but how? How does that work? What do we learn from failure that prevents more of the same? How do we not let fear of failure keep us from trying things? We tried to answer those questions, and many more, in a Freakonomics Radio series we first published in 2023, called “How to Succeed at Failing.” I suspect that you are also intrigued by failure: When we asked listeners to send us their failure stories, we got many, many replies — stories about failure in the business world, about failures of government policy, failed relationships, failures of imagination, failures of determination ... So we're replaying that series on Freakonomics Radio starting this week. You will hear those stories, and you’ll also hear about better ways to think about failure, and learn from it. I learned a lot from making this series, and I hope you do too.

You can hear this week’s episode of Freakonomics Radio, “How to Succeed at Failing, Part 1: The Chain of Events (Update),” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. A full transcript is available on our website.

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