Britain has been mismanaging inventions and ideas with impeccable style for centuries. Next spring, we will finally get a museum to celebrate the results: the Museum of Failure is coming to the UK.<\/p>\n
Its founder, Dr Samuel West, is anticipating a warm welcome: Britain, he said, was the museum\u2019s spiritual home. \u201cI\u2019ve travelled all over the world with the museum but I\u2019ve always wanted to bring it back home because of our black humour and our support of the underdog,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Brits totally get it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Museum of Failure,<\/a> a travelling exhibition, is dedicated entirely to missteps, flops and aborted ambitions. Its collection spans failed gadgets, ill-fated design experiments, culinary disasters, corporate overreach \u2013 showcasing the messy, often hilarious side of innovation.<\/p>\n UK-born exhibits include the Titanic<\/a>, the Sinclair C5<\/a>, the NHS\u2019s national IT programme<\/a>, Dyson\u2019s Zone<\/a>, Amstrad<\/a> and The Body Shop<\/a>. And, of course, Brexit<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ben Strutt, an innovator who conducts workshops on how to turn failure into strategic wins, has visited the museum and said it could change the conversation about failure by normalising it.<\/p>\n Brexit is among the UK-born exhibits in the Museum of Failure. Photograph: Guy Bell\/Rex\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n \u201cVisitors will see how some of the biggest, most recognisable brands in the world have failed and how 42% of all startups fail,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThey will also see how things failed in their time but were ultimately successful \u2013 like the Apple Newton<\/a> paving the way for the iPhone, and Google Glass<\/a> doing the same for augmented reality wearables \u2013 or how better products fail while worse ones succeed, like Betamax and VHS,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But it is not just for scoffing at. West stressed that the museum was not about ridicule but about understanding ambition, risk and the lessons embedded in collapse.<\/p>\n He said that despite all the talk about constructive failure in Silicon Valley and \u201cfailing forward\u201d, for most people failure remained taboo.<\/p>\n \u201cI want to reframe failure and show it is a universal and necessary part of innovation and learning,\u201d he said. \u201cThe museum\u2019s message is that we need to take bold meaningful risks to solve the largest problems of our times, environmental, social, economical. If we continue to glorify success and stigmatise failure we will not be able to experiment with and explore the solutions that we need.\u201d<\/p>\n The Apple Newton, although seen as a failure, paved the way for the iPhone. Photograph: Goran Heckler\/Alamy<\/p>\n Fiona Murden, a psychologist who has written about failure, said the museum could help people, especially young people, think differently about risk, creativity and resilience.<\/p>\n But while glorifying success was a risk, she said, so was celebrating failure: \u201cWhen failure is framed too positively, like it\u2019s always a cool or enlightening experience, it can unintentionally send the message that failure is easy or without serious consequences. That risks invalidating the frustration, stress and setbacks people genuinely experience, which can be significant, especially in high-stakes or personal contexts.\u201d<\/p>\n West agreed that the degree to which failures are or are not tolerated is largely cultural. \u201cA woman came up to me after a talk I gave in Ivory Coast and she was really angry and she was right to be,\u201d he said. \u201cShe pointed out that I was approaching failure as a rich, white, privileged western male \u2013 that if she failed in her business, her entire family would be plunged into poverty.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the same if you\u2019re a guest worker in Dubai or Qatar on a contract: if you fail, it\u2019s not just a matter of you doing a postmortem workshop to discover what went wrong. No, it\u2019s your livelihood, it\u2019s your family, it\u2019s your visa,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Failure is also understood differently across cultures. In China, visitors came to the museum so they could, they told West, laugh at failed western products. In South Korea, a risk-averse country, visitors were simply confused by what they perceived to be a celebration of failure.<\/p>\n In the US, however, the museum was treated as a big joke. \u201cIn the US, failure is framed in the narrative of success, and so visitors there found the museum funny,\u201d said West. \u201cThey just didn\u2019t get it when I tried to tell them that sometimes failures lead nowhere; they\u2019re painful and there\u2019s no happy ending.\u201d<\/p>\n But in Britain, where the venue has yet to be confirmed, he suspects the reception will be more intuitive. \u201cThe British sense of humour embraces that sarcastic, dark awareness that things can just go horribly wrong,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain has been mismanaging inventions and ideas with impeccable style for centuries. 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