Why we reward failure
A pharma company likes to call itself scientific. But that’s not true.
Or at least, it’s only true in one part of the company. The lab.
In the lab, we’re genuinely experimental. Most hypotheses turn out to be wrong. Most molecules are discarded. Years of work can end with the conclusion that the idea simply wasn’t good enough.
And yet nobody treats this as evidence that science has broken down. In fact, it’s evidence that science is working.
You could say that pharma has built its greatest achievements on failure. Progress happens because experiments produce inconvenient results, weak ideas are killed off, reality is allowed to overrule conviction.
Yet the moment pharma leaves the laboratory, failure suddenly becomes unacceptable.
Commercial projects are the opposite, with confident business cases, experienced executives and predetermined outcomes. Innovation pilots acquire suspiciously flattering metrics. Conference presentations reconstruct messy journeys as smooth, intelligent decisions.
Which is strange, because if we really were scientific, we’d have a lot more failures to show for it.
The work nobody submits
At the Impatient Awards, we think failures deserve a stage. We’re encouraging entries that conventional awards tend to exclude: pilots that went no further, strategies that were abandoned and projects stopped before launch.
These stories don’t produce triumphant graphs or gleaming case studies. They get buried, taking their lessons with them. What a tremendous waste of knowledge.
So, yes, we’re celebrating failure. Not as a consolation prize, but because an honest failure often contains more useful information than a carefully crafted success.
No failure, no evolution
Evolution doesn’t begin with ‘survival of the fittest.’ It begins with variation.
Different possibilities must be exposed to the world before you can choose which is best. Yet pharma often jumps straight to selection, asking leaders, committees, researchers and signatories to approve the correct answer before anything meaningfully different has been attempted.
In the rare case that more than one idea is presented, the safest and most defensible is the one that’s chosen. But choosing between minor variations of the familiar isn’t experimentation. It’s maintenance for the status quo.
Real progress requires possibilities that might not survive. An organisation in which everything succeeds may simply be attempting nothing uncertain enough to teach it anything. And if a pilot doesn’t force a different decision, it isn’t really a pilot, it’s just a sales presentation on a smaller scale.
Earning failure
Don’t get me wrong, not every failure deserves applause. Negligence isn’t experimentation, poor execution isn’t innovation, and repeating a mistake isn’t learning. Nor should patient safety, scientific integrity and ethical standards ever be compromised as a bold idea is pursued.
The failures worth rewarding begin with a real uncertainty and a credible attempt to resolve it. Something changes as a result, and the lesson becomes useful to others.
Failure that changes nothing is waste. Failure that changes what happens next is progress.
Awards help define what an industry considers admirable. We want to recognise the work that challenged, even when that meant withdrawing an initiative, abandoning an assumption or deciding never to launch at all. We’re rewarding the willingness to go beyond.