Embracing failure
Challenges and setbacks can strengthen students’ resilience and are an important aspect of learning. This is why the Student Project House adopts the “fail-forward” approach. An essay by Moritz Mussgnug about mistakes and failure.
Making mistakes is a marvellous thing. All of us can benefit from the growth that comes from failure, the chance to make a better future by learning from past mistakes. That’s why we have always fostered a no-blame culture at the Student Project House. The “fail-forward" approach is a key part of our mindset.
The Student Project House is a place where undergraduates and doctoral students from ETH Zurich can follow up their own ideas. By welcoming students who are intrinsically motivated to pursue an idea and giving them an opportunity to run their own project, we create what we believe is a really valuable working environment. We cultivate important cross-disciplinary skills such as communication, leadership and project management – mainly in interdisciplinary teams, adding an extra dimension to traditional learning formats. Whether an idea has anything to do with a student’s course of study is irrelevant to us, because the learning comes from the project itself. What matters are the goals a team chooses to set, the goals it achieves – and also the ones it doesn’t. We see setbacks and a team’s response to failure as part of an important process, with the fail-forward approach at the heart of that.
For us, a successful project is one where the team starts out with an idea they believe in. A team that discusses, probes and tests their idea and then goes on to improve, tweak and expand it. Whether that then leads to more testing and tweaking or a complete rethink is up to them! For us, success is not a market-ready product, but rather a team that has purposefully gone through this process of testing, failing and adapting. That’s the core learning effect that will benefit students in their future careers.
We employ coaches at the Student Project House to support the project teams. These coaches – and I am one of them – believe wholeheartedly in the students’ ideas. We ask difficult questions. We motivate them. But we never pressure them to choose a particular topic or finish by a certain deadline. And we never dictate which path they should take. We do, however, cultivate an environment that removes barriers to participation. For example, nobody has to apply to come here; every ETH student is welcome. There is no selection procedure, and no competition between projects. We don’t evaluate project ideas, and we don’t give grades or credits.
This approach is even reflected in the architecture of the Student Project House. Everything is open plan, so escaping to a secluded meeting room is not an option. Neither coaches nor teams have a dedicated workspace – that’s just one example of the flat hierarchies here.
About
Moritz Mussgnug is head of Ideaspace and interim co-head of the Student Project House at ETH Zurich.
When a project comes to an end, the coach and team take a moment together to look back and reflect. Sometimes, we create a timeline to review how the project progressed. That helps us identify the highs and lows. It’s always heartening to see how teams intuitively understand that the tough phases were much more instructive than the times where everything ran smoothly. It’s the challenges and setbacks that help the students emerge stronger.
The fact that we don’t grade students or their ideas makes it much easier to talk about failure. It transforms the discussion into a positive exchange of ideas, which nicely rounds off the project. And it’s something the students can take pride in long after their time at the Student Project House is over.