When the Plan Fails

Today’s Long View is about failure. It starts with two disappointments at the Forum and one call I made on Iran that events did not bear out, and it draws on ten scholars who have studied how people and institutions recover when a plan fails. It then turns to the war, the Gulf, and the flight to Tel Aviv that was nearly brought down, and it ends with what changes here. The opening is free for every reader. The rest is for premium members, and every Forum donor reads it with the Forum’s compliments. The daily brief returns Monday.

When the Plan Fails

A program of mine did not work, a partnership did not fit, and the war has not ended the regime in Tehran. Ten scholars on what to do after a plan fails, and what changes at the Forum.

Recently a program I designed for the Middle East Forum did not work. I had hoped to engineer it into the organization, and it did not take. In the same period the Forum explored working with another organization, in the hope that cooperation would add to our own work. We concluded that it was not a good match.

Neither compares with what follows in this essay. The war against the Islamic Republic has not produced the result I told audiences in March to expect. And on September 30 a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv came close to being brought down.

A failed program, a partnership that did not fit, a forecast that missed and a near disaster in the air differ in scale and are alike in one respect. In each, someone expected one thing and got another. The useful response is the same in all four: say what was expected, say what happened, find the assumption that broke, and change a practice.

Two weeks ago I wrote here that the Forum’s value lies in being right, “and in being accountable when we are wrong.” That is an easy sentence to write about a research product. This essay applies it to its author first. Then, with the help of ten scholars who have studied how people and institutions respond to failure, it applies it to the war and the region.

A failure teaches nothing by itself. It is information, and information is useful only to someone who reads it. Most of us prefer not to. The first instinct after a plan fails is to defend the plan, and the second is to find the person or the circumstance that ruined it.

Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist, is known for the finding that people who believe ability can be developed handle setbacks better than people who believe it is fixed. The careful version of her work is more modest than the popular one. A national experiment with more than 12,000 American ninth graders, which she co-authored, found a real effect and a small one: a tenth of a grade point among lower-achieving students.

What I take from her is a narrower tool. In a 2020 paper, she and her co-authors describe people who, when progress stalls, put a few plain questions to themselves, among them “How else can I do this?” The question moves attention from whether my design was good to what a better approach would require.

George Bonanno of Columbia University supplies a second correction to the usual story. He has measured how people respond to loss and disaster for more than two decades, and his central finding is that most of them keep functioning. Resilience is the common result.

He attributes it to flexibility, which he describes as a sequence of questions: “What is happening?” “What do I need to do?” “What am I able to do?” “Is it working?” Nothing in that sequence requires the setback to have been good for anyone. I make no claim that these failures improved me or the Forum. The claim is smaller: they can be used.

“A failure teaches nothing by itself. It is information, and information is useful only to someone who reads it.”

The Long View continues below for premium members: the program and the partner, one call of mine on Iran that missed, the Gulf capital by capital, the lesson of flight 1073, and what changes at the Forum. Every donor to the Middle East Forum receives premium membership with the Forum’s compliments; if your invitation has not arrived, write [email protected].