What 449 ‘Failures’ Can Teach Us About Success

In the 1960s, Unilever, a company known for manufacturing laundry detergent, had a major problem.

The problem wasn’t their manufacturing process (pumping boiling hot chemicals through a nozzle and collecting the powder in a vat); their problem was the nozzles didn’t work properly.

They kept clogging up.

‘The nozzles were a damn nuisance,’ said Steve Jones, a former employee. ‘They were inefficient, kept blocking and made detergent grains of different sizes.’ [1]

This was a major setback for the company, not just because of maintenance and lost time, but also because of the quality of the product.

Sales were declining and they needed to come up with a nozzle that worked.

Fast.

They turned to their crack team of mathematicians. They delved deep into the problem, and after a long period of study, they came up with a new design…

But it didn’t work.

The nozzle kept blocking.

So, almost in despair, Unilever turned to its team of biologists.

They thought outside the box.

They took ten copies of the nozzle and applied small changes to each one. Then they subjected them to failure by testing them.

‘Some nozzles were longer, some shorter, some had a bigger or smaller hole, maybe a few grooves on the inside’, explained Jones. ‘But one of them improved a very small amount on the original, perhaps by just one or two percent’.

They then took the ‘winning’ nozzle and created ten slightly different copies, and repeated the process. They then repeated it again, and again, and after 45 generations and 449 ‘failures’, they had a nozzle that was outstanding.

‘Progress had been delivered not through a beautifully constructed masterplan (there was no plan), but by rapid interaction with the world’, writes Matthew Syed in Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success. ‘A single, outstanding nozzle was discovered as a consequence of testing, and discarding, 449 failures’. [2]

What Do You Do When You Fail?

We all fail.

We will fail to move toward a goal, change a habit, learn a skill … but what’s more important is what you choose to do after we fail. If you embrace failure, you can learn from it, adapt, improvise and overcome our impediments. If, though, you blame your environment, your lack of resources, your upbringing, etc. you risk making a mistake: repeating your failure when you should have learned from it.

Takeaways from Unilever’s success…

1. Be tenacious. ‘Persistence is doing something again and again until it works’, writes Seth Godin. ‘Tenacity is using new data to make new decisions to find new pathways to find new ways to achieve a goal when the old ways didn’t work’. Unilever solved their problem by trial and error, by variation and selection. Unilever was tenacious. [3]

2. Have a growth mindset. A person with a growth mindset will fail and say, ‘That didn’t work’, or, ‘It failed’, meaning: the approach I used was inefficient in helping me achieve my outcome. A person with a fixed mindset will fail and say, ‘I failed; therefore, I am a failure’. You’re only a failure if you start to blame.

3. ‘Take off your watch’. James Clear calls it ‘putting in the reps’. Seth Godin calls it ‘shipping’. Steven Pressfield calls it ‘doing the work’. I call it ‘taking off your watch’. If you really want to overcome failure and achieve your goal, you have to be prepared to invest your time and energy, and accept, ‘this might not work’. How many failures are you willing to endure? Unilever’s magic number was 449. What’s yours?