1012: Triple Your Learning through Productive Failure with Dr. Manu Kapur

Pete Mockaitis
Manu, welcome.

Manu Kapur
Thank you, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to talk about learning and failure, and you are a master of failure. I mean that in the best possible way. And so, I’d love it if you could kick us off with you sharing a tale of one of your personal, or professional, most productive failures.

Manu Kapur
You know, looking back, I think it started very early on in my teenage years when I wanted to be a professional soccer player, and it’s a story I tell. It only makes sense looking back, as I said. My coach used to have a philosophy of training, strengths training, where he’ll say, “You’ve got to push your body, you’ve got to do your push-ups and your pull-ups and your sprints and everything to failure, until you really buckle, until you really can’t, and then you push a little bit more, as long as it was safe.”

And his idea was, you know, good things happen on the other side of failure. You really have to push it to know what it feels like to be there. And it’s only after that, when you give the body a chance to recover, and the nutrition and rest, it comes out stronger on the other side. And that, at the time.

We used to really hate that training, but as a metaphor for, not just a metaphor, now a science for just learning and growth, whether it’s strengths training or learning, it’s something that has inspired me for many years.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And science, indeed. I’ve dug into those papers that powerlifters and bodybuilders look at. And, yes, progressive overload is absolutely the name of the game in strength training.

Manu Kapur
Super compensation, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’re saying this same principle is applicable in many domains of learning growth improvement.

Manu Kapur
Exactly. It’s the idea of bringing the system to rupture, to failure in a safe way, and then allowing it the chance and the support and the feedback and the resources to adapt and grow so that it comes out stronger from where it started. Yeah, we see this in a number of systems. In fact, it was the subject of one of my TED Talks recently as well, “How failure drives learning” in many different scenarios, in many different contexts.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, please share with us some other examples because I think some might say, “Well, yes, of course, that is just how the interesting biology of muscle fibers happen to work.” How is that working in other domains?

Manu Kapur
You know, if you just look at language itself, if I ask you to think about happy words or positive words, you may be able to start rattling off a few words. Now, if I ask you to think about negative words, negative emotion words, not only would you be able to rattle off faster, which also means that you will rattle off a lot more. And language itself has preserved this idea that negative emotions, things that are not happy or fun, they’re more salient because they convey more information for survival that we need to learn.

Because if you went out and you survive and you came back and you’re happy and fun, it’s really good, but it doesn’t help you learn or grow in any way. It’s only when you fail at something, you learn something and you develop a vocabulary for it. And conveying that vocabulary for how you felt, how you failed, and how you came out of that, that becomes very critical. So, it’s captured in a language as well but also, like I said, in biology and strength training.

In memory, for example, we see the similar effect. It’s when you introduce people at a party, for example, we often say, “Hi, I’m Manu. And you are?” and you would say, “Pete.” I often tell people you should not do that at all. You should say, “Hi, would you like to guess my name?” And you guess my name, a random name, right? You can say, “Oh, are you Mark?” I’d say, “No, I’m Manu.” And then when I say, “May I guess your name?” I’ll say, “Are you John?” And you’ll say, “No, no, I’m Pete.” You see, even a random failure of just guessing your name will help me remember your name more. I’m more likely to remember your name than if you were to just tell me your name.

Pete Mockaitis
Now that’s fascinating right there, it’s this completely contrived situation. And so, I’m curious, in terms of scientific literature, like, just how pronounced is this effect? Do I get, like, a little bit of a bump, like “Oh, I’m 3% more likely to remember a name?” Or is it like night and day?

Manu Kapur
It is a significant bump. I mean, I have to go back to the literature to look at the effect sizes, right? But it is a significantly strong effect that if you practice this method, it’s called retrieval practice, or a failed generation effect. If you’ve practice this, you are likely to strengthen what you’re trying remember over time.

In fact, the idea is you should allow, and here it gets even more interesting, is if you want to strengthen the memory of something, you should allow some forgetting because forgetting increases the chance that when you try to remember it, you will fail to remember it fully, and that failure to retrieve it fully actually gives you a better encoding when you learn to correct-think.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know what is so amazing about what you’re saying is that this just happened to me last night. And this is the most small-scale example, but my wife asked me to open up the Waterpik, the water-flossing oral hygiene device. It has a reservoir of water on it, and it’s kind of tricky to remove it, and so I kept trying to remove it, and I was like, “Ah, shoot, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.”

And then she reminded me, she was like, “Oh, well, last time you did this, you said you were surprised. You thought you had to pull it one way, but you actually had to pull it the other way.” And I was like, “Wow, I have no memory of that,” but then I did it, and I was like, “Well, sure enough, that’s exactly right. I had to pull it down instead of out, or to the right.”

And then that experience just felt so novel and resonant to me, in terms of, like, “Wow, she remembered how I failed last time and I didn’t, and it’s just, like, this experience of being reminded in this way makes me…” I just have a feeling, we’ll see what happens in the years to come, but I am pretty sure this is locked in my brain now, the second time, how I’m going to open up this Waterpik.

Manu Kapur
That’s a really great demonstration from your life where you forgot how you did it, because you could do it at one point in time, you could remember it, you forgot how you did it, and then you failed to do it the second time around, but when somebody told you that “This is how you did it,” now the charge, now the encoding is even stronger. So, again, this idea that failure to retrieve something actually increases the strength of your memory, provided you get the correct thing, is really powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you share with us some other surprising discoveries here?

Manu Kapur
Then we go into the idea of, if memory can be improved by a failed retrieval effort, then can we go beyond memory? So, we’ve looked at, or researchers have looked at in tutoring situations, for example, people tutoring, tutor-tutee sort of interactions.

And they found that tutors tend to give a lot of explanations about how to solve the problems, and so on and so forth. But they found that the same explanation would have an effect on learning only if it comes at a point in time where the tutee is stuck in their efforts. So, if you’re a tutee and you are proceeding, you’re not stuck in your problem-solving efforts at all, and I give you an explanation of the correct explanation of the concepts required, you’re not likely to learn that at all.

It’s only when you get to a point of impasse, of getting stuck, that’s when you, if the explanation is timed at that point in time, that’s what leads to learning. So, it almost seems like that we need to be in the state, a cognitive state, or even an affective state, where we are stuck or we have failed to remember something or to do something, and if at that time somebody reminds us or somebody gives us the correct explanation, that’s when we learn really powerfully.

And in productive failure, we’ve taken that to the next level, where if you’re learning anything new from the get-go, how do you design for failure intentionally in this early learning process so that you can then bootstrap that failure for learning from an expert later on?

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that is really cool. And it resonates in terms of when you’re stuck for a while, and then you hear the information, it seems like an epiphany, a revelation, an “Aha!” so much more high stakes, as opposed to someone just laying out the whole pathway, like, “Well, this is the basics of physics,” or whatever subject it is.

Manu Kapur
Exactly. And the reason that doesn’t work is, to understand something deeply, you need to be able to see “What is the underlying structure? What is so critical here?” So, imagine if you’re watching a movie, right? Say, it’s a very entertaining, very engaging movie. Now, if the person sitting you is an expert director, unless, I don’t know whether you make movies or not, how expert you are, but, say, you’re a novice at making movies.

Now, you come out of the movies and I ask you, “Did you see the same movie as the director?” Chances are, no, you did not. The director sees things that are right in front of you, right? It’s not that you were not engaged, you were not entertained, your attention was all there, the stimulus was right in front of you, yet the expert sees very different things from a novice. The expert sees the deep structure that the novice is just not able to see, because seeing is a function of what you know, not just a perceptual exercise, right?

And so, this is one of the reasons why experts just telling what they know, even in a very entertaining, very structured manner, is still not sufficient because what an expert sees in their presentation is not what a novice is seeing. And, therefore, the first job of learning something new is actually not to be told what the correct thing is. The first job is to preparing yourself to be in a state where you can then learn from.

The same explanation is very important, but getting into a state where you can process that information, see what is critical, and then code it properly and more deeply, that is even more important. And that’s what failure does, and that’s the whole system that we’ve designed.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say preparing yourself to get into a state, I mean, it sounds like we just have to enter that state, is I guess we have many words in our vocabulary for it. It’s sort of like frustration, aggravated, stuck, like, “This doesn’t make any sense. Aargh!” I mean, it sounds like, well, you tell me. Is there a sweet spot in terms of, I guess, you don’t want to get utterly enraged that you quit and stomp out of the room? Help me out there.

Manu Kapur
So, let me take you through a thought experiment. Suppose I give you a task and you’re able to do it successfully, are you learning anything new other than knowing that, yeah, you’ve mastered this, you’ve done something successfully? So, I give you an even harder task, say, you’re able to do that too. You’re still not learning anything new. You’re just applying what you know.

I have to give you a task that is so hard, or just hard enough that you’re not able to do, and that’s when I know that you’ve entered the learning zone because failure gives you a signal that, “Here is something I cannot do. With all the capabilities that I have, I’m entering the failure zone. And in this zone, I’m bound to struggle, I’m bound to get anxious at times, but I can also try different things, different ideas, different solutions, and so on and so forth. And all of this is actually what prepares me for learning from the expert or a common resource later.”

So, getting in this state is really important, and knowing that these emotions, and normalizing the struggle in this state, is the norm, basically, it’s the expectation that helps you persist in that learning zone, so to speak. But you’re also right, it cannot be so hard that you just give up. So, there is like that Goldilocks zone where it is hard that you can’t do it by yourself, but it’s not so hard that you just give up, and you have to be in that zone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then tell us, how do we intentionally enter into experiences, or design it to be that way? So, it sounds like the wrong way, or old way, or non-Manu enlightened way is to just have the expert pontificate, and say, “Hey, here’s all the steps.” Or you can read the instruction booklet, and say, “Okay, this is the guide. I do A, then B, then C.” But then the superior way for retention and really learning growth is “I get in there, I feel stuck and frustrated, and then I absorb some brilliance.”

So, I’m wondering, so let’s say I want to learn how to make my first app. I want to figure out what’s up with these programming languages. So, maybe I, rather than just reading the book or watching the YouTube video, like, “Hey, here’s how to program Python,” or whatever, I would want to just kind of, following these principles, just give get up in there, and then get stuck, and then try to get the specific answer to what I’m stuck with?

Manu Kapur
Yeah, so it’s basically trying multiple ways of approaching that problem. So, try to design, maybe the app is too big sort of a construct. Maybe some aspect or a feature that you maybe you scope it down, maybe an email capture, or a visit capture feature, or you want to build an AI algorithm into it, whatever that thing is.

The important part is you try to design not one but different ways of putting that feature in place and then try to see whether there is a canonical way or there are more expert ways to sort of design those features. But, again, here I must say that if the goal is for you to be able to deeply understand how to do those things and why they work the way they do, then you need to do productive failure.

But if your goal is just achieving that it happens without necessarily understanding it so, then you do not need productive failure. Because the effect of productive failure is on deep learning and transfer and creativity. We are not always in situations where we need that. So, this is a personal thing that everybody has to ask, or a teacher or a trainer has to ask, “Is this something that people really need to deeply understand? Or is this something that is so procedural that we just need to get it done?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I think that’s very helpful for organizations as well, and just your whole life, in terms of, “Is my goal to become excellent at assembling IKEA furniture? Is that a thing that’s important to me?” So, in the domain of IKEA furniture or anything, maybe that sparks a bigger question of, “Is this even something we should be doing?”

And if it is something, so in a way, that’s almost kind of one key consideration is, “Well, if it’s something we want to be doing, it may make sense for us to learn a ton and be utter masters and have a deep, excellent competence in this thing. Or it might be something that we just want to be okay at and we’ll do it in-house fine. Or it might be something we don’t care at all about having that knowledge. Let’s totally outsource it.”

Manu Kapur
Exactly. Exactly. And that’s the distinction I mean between you want just high performance without understanding, just get the job done. So, there are many things at work and life we can just do, and do it to a certain level that we are happy with, and that’s it. But there are other things that we have a learning goal attached to it, the things we deeply want to master and understand and so on and so forth. And it’s only for those things that you may want to enter the failure zone and struggle and persist and then learn from an expert later on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then give us some more perspective on how we design such a situation up front.

Manu Kapur
So, for example, in, say, in schooling situations, whether you’re designing a course for somebody or something to learn, as we already established, if this is something they want to deeply understand, you don’t want to tell the person exactly what the thing is, and so quantificating doesn’t work. So, the first thing you want to design is, you want to design a task or a challenging activity that is beyond the learner’s skillsets and abilities.

You need to have a sense of where the learners are in terms of their knowledge and skillsets, and you want to design this problem-solving activity or a task that you want to give them that’s beyond that, right? But you also want to design them in a way that’s very intuitive. It should be intuitively accessible so that learners or people can try multiple approaches.

So, think at work, maybe you’re given a challenging project where you’ve never managed such a project before, and then you work with your team to strategize or design different approaches to getting this project done. But because this project is beyond your skillsets and abilities and beyond your team skillsets and abilities, chances are all the approaches or solutions or strategies that you develop are going to be either not going to lead to success or they will just be suboptimal in that way.

But giving people a chance to be in that space, and design that space and be in that space where they can explore different strategies, even if they don’t work, I think that is key. Also what this key is to tell people that it’s okay not to be able to get to the correct solution, because the goal of this learning task is the preparation, not the solution. And the more people explore different ideas and strategies and solutions, the more they are prepared to then learn from the experts.

So, it’s designing the space in that way that helps you then learn from the expert. And you can do this as a teacher, as a parent, as a trainer, as a manager, and so on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if you could really paint a picture for just the sheer efficacy of this stuff. I want to hear about this meta-analysis of I the 50+ studies that showed students who were taught productive failure methods saw some really cool academic gains. Can you share with us what was that study’s findings? And paint a picture of sort of a beautiful scenario of these principles all used in practice and being amazing.

Manu Kapur
So, the context of the meta-analysis in learning experiments, in mathematics, and science and so on and so forth, so the context is an education context, so let me concretize. Suppose you’re trying to learn math. I don’t know how you learned math in your school but my teacher would come in and say, “Today, the new concept we’re learning is blah. Let me tell you what this concept is. Here’s the explanation. Here’s the formulation. Here are some examples, and we work through examples. Now it’s your turn to apply those examples and solve problems.” And that’s how you learn.

And this is a method that’s called direct instruction. You don’t know something, I tell you exactly what it is, and I explain it to you very clearly what it is, and I give you problems to solve. And this is the dominant way that even current educational practice actually runs. Now, in productive failure, we went into classrooms and say, “Well, before you teach somebody something, let’s design problem-solving activities based on productive failure principles where students are given a chance to explore solutions to a problem.”

And we know that the solutions they will generate will not be the correct one. We even tell students that “It’s okay not to be able to get to the correct one, that’s not even the point, but try different ideas, just try different approaches, and then we will teach you.” So, it’s like instead of going straight into the instruction, they first do generative problem solving, and then the teacher comes in and teaches.

So, we can put these methods side by side and say, “Okay, if you learn from one method or the other, and you conduct an experiment study where you equalize the time, the same teachers teaching for the same time using the same materials, and so on and so forth, so you create a nice experiment where you can compare and then people learn through these two methods. And in the end, you test them on different kinds of knowledge.”

So, we particularly tested them on three types. One is the basic knowledge, which is, “Do you understand the concept? Can you remember it? Can you apply it to solve problems that you’ve seen in the class?” And then, also on conceptual understanding and transfer, your ability to take what you have and apply it to novel contexts, which is really the holy grail of learning, is to take what you know and apply it to novel contexts. And then we compare these two groups of students in terms of how they do.

And we find that even though both methods are very good at developing basic knowledge, foundational knowledge, students who learn through productive failure actually develop deeper understanding of the concepts that they are trying to learn, that they learned, and their ability to creatively or adapt the knowledge that they have to solve new problems in novel contexts, that actually is significantly better.

Now, imagine, this is just one study that shows this, and how scientists proceed is they say, “Oh, this is one study. Let me try to replicate it.” And the logic of replication is that “I’m going to prove you’re wrong.” So, now they try to replicate it, and say the attempt to replication failed. They find the same effects that, roughly, as I found. So, now there are two studies.

Say, another person comes in, a new lab tries to replicate it, and again the attempt to fail fails. And over time, you get a series of studies, each trying to you know fail the basic hypothesis and they fail to do so. So, over time, you have many studies who have failed to fail the basic hypothesis. And that’s when scientists start to say, “Ah, because of this vast magnitude of studies in different contexts, in different countries, trying to explore the same experiment or similar experimental effect, that there’s something there now.”

What we call truth is really an attempt to fail has failed. And that’s what a meta-analysis does. It aggregates findings from all the studies that have tried to compare over the years, and those are the 50 study, 160-odd experimental effects, and we aggregate it and analyze that, and said, “What is the average effect across these multiple studies in the world for productive failure over this other method, the dominant method, direct instruction, and how strong is that effect?”

So, we found a positive effect in favor of productive failure. As I said, they understand better and they transfer better, they’re more creative. But how strong it is? Now, we found that if you learn with a good teacher for a year, and say the unit gain in your knowledge is, say, X, then if you learn using productive failure, on average your knowledge gain is 2X.

Pete Mockaitis
Twice? Okay. Double.

Manu Kapur
But if productive failure is carried out really well, because it’s a method, right, some teachers carry it out much better than others, if it’s carried out really well, then you can go up to 3X. And that’s a very, very strong effect in education, in learning situations, that you can do, that you can have this kind of an effect on learning. And so, that’s the evidence-based, that’s the research, the empirical-based, for example, for this body of research, and we know that it works.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, triple your learning feels like a headline, Manu. All right, we’re getting somewhere. So, could you really paint a picture for a specific classroom educator approach situation in which we see, “Wow, here’s this, all these productive failure principles and philosophies put into action masterfully”? What’s that really look like?

Manu Kapur
Well, that design itself is called productive failure. So it has certain features. So, A, it has to be beyond our current skillsets and knowledge. You should not be able to solve the problem using what you know. That’s one very simple feature that it has to have. B, the problem should admit multiple representations, multiple solutions, multiple strategies. It should not have a single answer or single way of approaching it. So, it has to have that multiplicity.

It has to have contrasting sort of cases. So, don’t just give people one example, one case to work with. Give them contrasting cases. An example in this situation and in that situation, data about this, say, football player compared to data about another football player, the performance of this company versus performance…so always work with contrasts in these cases. Again, design these contrasts in ways that some things are the same, other things are different, so that you can direct attention to what you want people to attend to.

Keep the computational load very low so that you know people are really working with the conceptual basis, not trying to compute things all the time. And, yeah, so, again, this is not a like a prescriptive set of features, it is still a design activity. So, even with this set of features, people can generate many different kinds of tasks. And so, the more you get trained in using these features to design tasks, the closer you get to the kind of a productive failure task that really works.

Now once, say, you have a task ready or it’s working really well, you need to design interaction around those tasks. So, if I give you the task to solve, you may say, “Oh, I think this is my solution. This is one solution I have.” “How do I facilitate your exploration in that task?” So, there’s a very simple two-step exploration scheme, or facilitation scheme. So, I will, in the first instance, I’ll come to you and say, “Oh, this is your solution? Can you please explain it to me?”

Just the idea, just asking you to explain your solution to me is likely to trigger thoughts in you for other ways of doing it. We’ve seen this in our research. So, because the goal is multiple solutions and strategies, just asking somebody to explain often triggers them to explore something else as well. Second, sometimes people are really sure that this is their method, or this is the solution, and they’re quite convinced that it might work, even though from an expert standpoint it doesn’t.

That’s when you need to sort of get them into a habit of hacking their own thinking. What do I mean by that? It’s like when somebody says, “This is what my solution looks like.” After I ask them to explain it, I say, “Can you think of a situation where your own solution is not going to work?”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that.

Manu Kapur
So, it’s creating the counterfactual, and developing a habit to hack your own solution and say, “This is when it does not work.” Because it’s easy to say, “Oh, I developed it, it works.” It’s much harder to develop the habit of finding a situation or a context where it does not work. And just between these two, if you do this facilitation really well, you really help people either generate more solutions or understand the limits of their own solutions, even if they don’t work, most likely.

And all of this is then carried out in what I call an envelope, a social surround, within which people have to be told certain expectations, norms. Those are part of the design as well. And here’s the idea that the expectation is that you will not be able to solve the problem. The goal is not for you to be able to solve the problem correctly. The goal is really, “Can you generate multiple approaches, solutions, ideas, strategies for solving the problem? And don’t worry about getting it right.” Very explicit messaging.

Because if people think that they have to solve the problem correctly, they give up. The sweet spot is very, very narrow. But if people are told, “Look, we don’t even expect you to solve it because you don’t have the knowledge. But the idea here is, generate different ideas based on what you know,” then I think people can go a little bit more, so that sweet spot becomes a little bit wider. People can persist a little bit longer. They can deal with their anxiety and frustration a little bit longer, because, “You know, yeah, I’m not expected to solve it anyway, but let me give it a few shots. Let me give it a few tries.”

But these norms and expectations have to be set and persisted with over time so that people can do this. And when people have, you know, they’ve done the exploration, people have generated multiple ideas, and then they are now ready to receive instruction or receive expert knowledge, and that’s how it all comes together. That initial failed exploration becomes productive because an expert comes and assembles it all together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a story of, perhaps, one of the most brilliant, beautiful implementations of this that you’ve witnessed?

Manu Kapur
I think, sometimes, I’ve seen it in the classrooms, for example, when teachers do it really well, and you often see it in what the kinds of ideas the students produce. So, I remember a math classroom where, when we tried this and the teacher was really good, and she was also a very experienced teacher who had been working with us for a while, and after the problem-solving phase of productive failure where students are generating the solutions, I went up to a student, and said, “So how do you feel?” and the student said, “Oh, I feel like a mathematician today.”

And it’s astonishing because, he could not solve the problem correctly, and still the remark was that, “Oh, I feel like a mathematician today.” And this is so true because one of my colleagues is a mathematician, and he’s one of the top mathematicians in the world, and he told me, “You know, 95% of my efforts at solving problems are failures.” Ninety-five percent.

And he says, “But if I don’t have them, I’m not able to get to the correct solutions. I’m not able to get to the correct answers. 95% of the things just don’t work out, but they are the backdrop, the launchpad for me to then think about the things that can actually work.” And so, there’s something in how we just get to the really breakthrough ideas, real creativity, real innovation, and the path through that is failure, otherwise, we won’t get to it. And we’ve applied the similar dynamic, and sometimes it works out beautifully in the classrooms as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, I like that a lot, “I feel like a mathematician today,” seems to really convey a sense of, “Oh, I am really wrestling with the kinds of issues and concepts and considerations that a real professional grapples with, and I’ve gained an understanding of that.” And I feel like I had that moment recently after the election. I learned all about these predictive prediction marketplaces, like PredictIt and Polymarket and Kalshi.

Manu Kapur
Prediction markets, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “Whoa, this is wild!” So, I went into that rabbit hole, and so I’m thinking about, like, risks and probabilities, and bid-ask spreads, and I’m learning all these things. And then I had that thought, like, “I feel like a trader today because,” and though I’m not, I’m just some amateur schmo, but it’s like, “Those are the kinds of things they’re thinking about every day in terms of, ‘Oh, how much risk am I taking on? Is this appropriate? Da-da-da-da-da.’”

Manu Kapur
Exactly. Exactly. And this is the part of mathematics we don’t expose our students to. They learn a mathematics where a teacher just comes and pontificates and tells them, as though math is, people who do mathematics always know the solutions to all their problems, and it is far from the case. In fact, how people do mathematics is exactly how we can learn mathematics, provided we can design these failure-driven sort of problem-solving activities for students, and then teach them the concept.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you’ve got a great turn of a phrase, “motivational hacking.” How do we do that?

Manu Kapur
So, being in this zone where you’re trying things is not easy, right? And there are a few motivational hacks that help you persist in this problem-solving mode where you’re trying different things and things are not working out. First is the sunk cost fallacy. And that is the idea that if you’ve invested time and effort into something, you tend to stick to it even if it’s not working.

Now in general parlance, it’s not a good thing because then we continue to stay in losing strategies longer than we should, we continue to stay in bad relationships longer than we should, and so on and so forth. So, in those situations, it’s not good.

But in a learning situation, where if you’ve given a problem, if you’ve tried multiple strategies, you’ve put in the effort, that’s a good sunk cost, and that actually has motivational benefits. That’s the first. Just putting in the effort to solve something keeps you in the game because then you want to know how to solve it correctly. So, the sunk cost is a very good motivation from a learning standpoint and productive failure designs for that.

But before that even, like, how do you get started even, right? And that is the idea that if you want to learn, or basically if you want to solve a problem that may seem very, very daunting, the idea is to take the first step. And suppose I do, for my exercise, I do swimming. On some certain days, I’m just not motivated to enter the pool. It’s just too much. I’m too tired, I just don’t feel like it. But I know I must, I want, I must go.

So, I tell myself on those days, “I’m going to enter the pool and I’m just going to do one lap, and that’s it. If I can just manage one lap today, that’s my goal. It’s a success. Normally, I do 20, but today I’m just going to do one.” And guess what happens after the first lap? Do I just come out? No. “I’m in it? Okay, let’s do more, right?”

So, again, I just hacked my motivation by convincing myself that if I just get out, after taking the first step, I’ll be totally fine. When, in fact, once you’re in it, you’re in it, you continue. So that’s the second. Take the first step or find a way to make just the first step your goal. Then there is the goal gradient effect. You find that the more you do, the more laps you do, the more you want to do it, the more you want to reach the goal.

So, there’s like a gradient effect. It’s just not linear. So, effort actually pays off. And when you’re really near, and that’s the fourth one, when you’re really near, the last lap, we actually derive, we somehow seem to find this extra motivation to just get to the completion. So, we want to complete, and you will notice that. You find this second wind, extra energy. The last leg is always people want to complete. And that’s called the completion effect.

And so, these are the four sort of kind of motivation, how motivational hacks that people can do, to take the first step, to go on the goal gradient, to get to near the completion, and then the sunk cost comes in because then you want to really know, “Why didn’t my work, why didn’t my methods did not work? What is the correct method?”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, Manu, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Manu Kapur
Did we talk about the mechanisms, the activation, awareness, affect, and assembly, the four A’s?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it. Let’s cover it.

Manu Kapur
So, I call them, like, the underlying mechanisms of productive failure, and there are four umbrella mechanisms. There are sub mechanisms as well, but the four umbrella mechanisms, and they are the four A’s: activation, awareness, affect, and assembly. So, activation is the idea that if you want to learn something new, you need to activate your own knowledge so that you can process this new information.

If I start speaking in, say, Mandarin, and you have no knowledge about Mandarin, you can’t understand anything. So, new knowledge always requires prior knowledge to connect with and make sense. So, the more I can activate relevant knowledge in a learner, when you’re learning something new, the better they are prepared to learn that thing. And failure does a very good job at activation because it makes you try different things, different strategies, and that activates all the relevant knowledge. That’s the first A.

The second is what activation does. It shows you the limits of your own knowledge. You’ve tried multiple things, and they did not work or did not work optimally. You know the limits, “Here’s what I can do.” So, there is an awareness of a gap between what you know and the expert. That awareness itself is a very important mechanism. Having that awareness is a really important mechanism for learning because what that does is it creates an affect.

And by affect, I mean your motivation to find out what the expert knows, your interest in the solution, your orientation towards when the expert explains. You’re really oriented to understand why mine did not work, not just to see what the expert is saying, but really understand why mine did not work.

And also, the affect has emotions involved, and we talked about struggling and anxiety. And we found in our studies that sometimes negative emotions can have positive effects on learning, and other times not all positive emotions are positively associated with learning. So, it’s good to experience in a small dose, in a safe way some of these emotions around struggling and anxiety in a safe way because they can have positive effects on learning.

And affect encapsulates all of these sorts of constructs of interest, engagement, motivation, persistence, and emotions. So, you get into this affective state. So, your knowledge is activated, you’re aware of a gap, and you are in an affective state which is ready to learn. If at that point, an expert comes and assembles it, just shares with you, “Okay, what did you do? Let’s see why it did not work. Let me compare it with this other thing. Why that worked, why that did not work. Let me compare it with the expert strategy,” and slowly build up the canonical knowledge, the correct way or the correct ways of approaching those tasks or problems.

Assembly, that’s the fourth A. That’s what makes the whole thing click. So, activation, awareness, affect, and then assembly. That’s the science behind why intentionally designing for failure and then harnessing it for assembly works, makes failure productive.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Manu Kapur
Well, one of my favorite quotes is from my dad, actually, and it only makes sense looking back. He used to say, “Your ambition should always exceed your talent.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Manu Kapur
Oh, those I have several, and one of the ones that I’d like to give examples are of children playing with toys. And here, and I also talk about that in the book, is people have studied how children play with toys in experiments where, suppose you’re a group of children and they’re given a new toy, and says, “Here’s a new toy. Would you like to play with it? And just play as you like.” So, they just see how children play with those toys.

And to other groups of children, they give the same toy, and they say, “It’s a new toy. You have not seen it or played with it. Let me show you how to play with it.” So, they learn from an adult how to play with the toy, and then they’re given the toy and then they play with it as they like. And then people experiment, scientists examine, “What are the differences between these two groups. Who’s more engaged with the toy? Who’s more inventive in playing with the toy? Who creates strategies to discover how the toy works?”

And, invariably, people find that it’s the first group, which was not shown how to play with the toy, who’s actually more interested, more engaged, more curious, inventive, and finds strategies to play with that toy. And this is the part that I really love because it means that our ability to explore and tinker and fail is built into us from the get-go. And that’s one of the reasons why… you may think of play with tangible toys as one thing, but knowledge is conceptual play. So, a big part of productive failure is “How do you bring conceptual play to start with, followed by instruction?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Manu Kapur
I would say one of my favorite ones is Shantaram.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Manu Kapur
Oh, making my bed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Manu Kapur
Well, my online presence, so ManuKapur.com. If you want to learn about the book, it’s ProductiveFailure.com, or search on Amazon. I’m on LinkedIn as well, mainly, and also on Twitter or X, and Instagram. Or watch my two TED Talks.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Manu Kapur
Change mindsets. I think that’s the biggest thing that I want people to think about or take away in terms of our conversation today. That if you change your mindset, that if you don’t learn to fail, you will fail to learn and grow.

Pete Mockaiti
All right. Manu, thank you for this. I wish you many productive failures.

Manu Kapur
And you. Thank you so much, Pete.