Amy Edmondsen categories failures into three archetypes: 1. **Intelligent failures.** This is "the right kind of wrong," where I fail because I tried something as a hypothesis, and turned out to be wrong. I thought it through, I had a rationale, and I conducted an experiment, and it failed. 2. **Basic failures.** Human error caused a problem in something where there *was* a right way, within a known territory. A recipe wasn't followed. A discipline wasn't adhered to. A diet wasn't vigilantly pursued. They're preventable. This is where checklists prove useful. 3. **Complex failures.** Complex failure is multi-causal. There were a lot of causes, none of which isolated would have caused failure, but which together *did*. There might have been mistakes, but might not have been mistakes. The one aspect of this hierarchy that probably needs a slight tweaking is acknowledging that basic failures can also happen because we don't have the *skill* required. In which case, it's not a matter of just using checklists, but trying *again and again again and again* until we learn the right way, until it becomes muscle or mental-memory. Otherwise repeated basic failures are useless. None of these failures, in other words, profit us unless we reflect on their causes. I think of John Dewey here: "We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience." I’ve heard the quote, “I have failed more times than you have tried.” Apart from the condescending attitude of that quotation, it makes a good point. But that point could be made more precisely: "I have failed more times than you have tried, either in basic failures (necessary to put in the practice until I got it right) or intelligent failures (gathering insight along the way), and perhaps even in complex failures, but in all of them I have reflected and profited thereby." If one's life is characterized by repeated basic failures that fail to learn from the past, or "intelligent" failures that are never learned from, or "complex failures" that (perhaps) should best be avoided, ==A question: How do I increase the frequency of intelligent failures, and reduce complex failures, within [[Wicked domains]]?== Since wicked domains are characterized precisely by the fact that they don't offer ready-feedback. Perhaps the challenge is simply to *avoid* complex, multi-causal failure; but there may be some way to alchemize some complex failures to turn them into intelligent ones. ## Reference [McKay, Brett. "Podcast #940: The 3 Types of Failure (And How to Learn From Each)" (Art of Manliness, November 2023)](https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/podcast-940-the-3-types-of-failure-and-how-to-learn-from-each/) This is the source of Amy Edmondsen's hierarchy.