I remember my first day at one company. When you enter it, the first thing that you could see was the door of one of the company owner, that was the Development area responsible too. And I saw a poster with the following words:

Failure is not an option

It was a poster from the Nasa Apollo Project and this saying. And on that day, I thought that if I make a mistake, I would be fired.

What message do you send to your employee?

Nowadays, I’m not working for that company anymore. Even after I left that, that poster was always on my head. And as I am curious a lot, I tried to find the “real” meaning behind this words. And I was quite surprised with the first thing that I discovered: these words were never said by a Nasa guy.

To understand this saying, we have to talk about Gene Kranz. Eugene Francis “Gene” Kranz (born August 17, 1933) is an American aerospace engineer, retired fighter pilot, and a retired NASA Flight Director and manager. Kranz served as a Flight Director, the successor to NASA founding Flight Director Chris Kraft, during the Gemini and Apollo programs, and is best known for his role in directing the successful Mission Control team efforts to save the crew of Apollo 13, which later became the subject story of a major motion picture of the same name, in which he was portrayed by actor Ed Harris.

“Failure is not an option” was in fact coined by Bill Broyles, one of the screenwriters of Apollo 13, based on a similar statement made not by Kranz, but another member of the Apollo 13 mission control crew, FDO Flight Controller Jerry Bostick. According to Bostick:

As far as the expression ‘Failure is not an option’, you are correct that Kranz never used that term. In preparation for the movie, the script writers, Al Reinart and Bill Broyles, came down to Clear Lake to interview me on “What are the people in Mission Control really like?” One of their questions was “Weren’t there times when everybody, or at least a few people, just panicked?” My answer was “No, when bad things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never gave up on finding a solution.” I immediately sensed that Bill Broyles wanted to leave and assumed that he was bored with the interview. Only months later did I learn that when they got in their car to leave, he started screaming, “That’s it! That’s the tag line for the whole movie, Failure is not an option. Now we just have to figure out who to have say it.” Of course, they gave it to the Kranz character, and the rest is history.

So, as you can see, the real idea behind it is that when you have a problem, you should calm down, verify all the possibilities, without panic and never gave up to find a solution!

And is Nasa different?

One of the 17 original authors of the agile manifesto, Jim Highsmith, used to work at Nasa. And one of the ideas of agile is about Fail Fast! Fail Fast is a strategy of trying something, getting fast feedback, and then rapidly inspecting and adapting. In the presence of high levels of uncertainty, it is often less expensive to start working on a product, learn whether we made a good decision, and if not, kill it fast before more money is spent.

So, the point is: Is Failure an option?

The short answer? Yes. Failure is an option, as soon as you learn with it. There is no problem with failures if you use them as a step to learns new lessons. And, next time, try to send a better message to your employees.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. – Thomas Edison