Curator Samuel West: “Accept failure as an essential aspect of progress and innovation.”
The Museum of Failure isn’t on any list of the Top Things to do in Sweden—at least not yet. The new museum, which opened last week in Helsingborg, a city of 130,000 people on Sweden’s southern coast, has already attracted worldwide media attention and is drawing visitors from around the globe. In fact, Chinese tourists have been arriving by the busload “to look at the Donald Trump board game,” notes curator Samuel West, a former clinical psychologist who has more than 70 different failed products and objects on display in the 450-square-meter space.
The underlying message of the museum—that we can all learn from failure, that even the largest multinational companies fail spectacularly, and that business executives have the most to gain from an appreciation of failure—is worth considering. In fact, the museum’s essence recalls the work of the late Robert McMath, who spent decades building a collection of tens of thousands of failed consumer products, housed in his Ithaca, New York-based New Products Showcase and Learning Center, which I had the opportunity to visit in 2000. McMath would go on to write several columns for Failure, including one about Breakfast Mates, which explains how Kellogg’s went wrong when it tried to sell cereal and milk—a winning combination, if there ever was one—together.
In the following Failure Interview, West explains how he got the inspiration for the Museum of Failure, why his initial attempt to purchase the domain name went awry, and what he would like visitors to take away from a trip to the museum. Or see the Museum of Failure in photos.
How did you get the inspiration for the Museum of Failure?
For most of the past ten years I have been working as a consultant for companies, helping them develop and maintain environments that facilitate organizational creativity and innovation. For the past two or three years I have been looking for a new way to communicate [lessons surrounding innovation] because [lessons] usually come in the form of books or seminars or workshops and those are boring. Last year I was on vacation in Zagreb in Croatia and I visited the Museum of Broken Relationships and had this eureka moment where I realized I needed to open a real museum with real products and stories.
The local tourism bureau has branded Helsingborg as the “nicest” and “friendliest city in Sweden.” Does it live up to its name?
It sounds like the municipality has got a copywriter on there [laughs]. It’s beautiful and one of the more economically well-off regions of Sweden, and it has something to offer as a quaint, mid-sized Swedish city. Right now the major industry is information technology, and its close proximity to Copenhagen makes it attractive to multinationals that want to offer their employees a nice place to live that isn’t in the middle of nowhere.
When I think of Sweden and failure the first thing that comes to mind is the Vasa, which, as I’m sure you know, is the Swedish warship that sank just minutes into its maiden voyage on August 10, 1628.
I applied for state funding for the museum and one of the comments from the committee that decides on funding was: “Don’t we already have a museum of failure in Sweden?”—[a reference to] the Vasa Museum, which is the number one attraction in Sweden [according to TripAdvisor]. The Museum of Failure has only been open for five days, but it is currently bigger on the Internet than the Vasa Museum.
There’s an interesting connection between the Vasa and the Apple Newton, the latter of which we have here at the museum. Stability tests conducted before the Vasa was launched revealed that the ship was unstable. But the King [Gustav II Adolph of Sweden] and Admiral [Fleming] decided to launch it anyway, despite knowing its flaws. The ship barely made it into the harbor before it sank.
The Apple Newton was a similar story. The key feature of the Newton was the handwriting recognition but the technology didn’t work. Apple engineers must have known this, but they launched it anyway and the response was brutal. The Simpsons mocked it and the Newton became synonymous with technology that doesn’t work. It’s interesting that in four hundred years we haven’t learned anything.
Another common problem is when companies try to extend their brand too far. The Harley-Davidson eau de toilette is a good example.
The Harley-Davidson cologne is a great example of that. It totally alienated the macho biker fans of Harley. It reminds me of the toothpaste that was created by Swedish weapons manufacturer, Bofors, which was an instant flop.
Tell me about “I’m Back and You’re Fired!” Donald Trump board game.
The game is vile; it’s got a huge Donald Trump picture on the front, it’s got Donald Trump pictures on the money and on the cards—everywhere. We tried to play it the other day and it’s impossibly dull.
I could probably open an entire museum with all of Donald Trump’s failures. It’s interesting because Trump is a failure on so many levels, but still the president of the United States. [I guess it shows] that failures are not held against you; you can fail a lot—and in his case, catastrophically—and still be a success. So maybe—as long as nobody dies—failure is not that big of a deal, we just need to accept it better.
What do you want visitors to take away from a visit to the Museum of Failure?
The take home message for individuals and organizations alike is that we need to accept failure as an essential aspect of progress and innovation.
Second, we need to be better at learning from failure, instead of sweeping things under the carpet and disassociating ourselves from failures. Very few companies and organizations learn from their mistakes.
Third, when you see that multinational companies like Google and Apple fail when they try something new, that liberates us as individuals to say, “It’s okay for me to fail.” If you try something new you are going to fail; accept failure and don’t stigmatize it.
Originally published on FailureMag
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