Managerial and senior academics
Research Group
Individual
Reframing failure in academia
By N. Thomas, C. Bernstein, A, Kenny, K. Haywood, F. Boardman, J. MacArtney
This infographic summarises key insights from our literature review on what has been written about failure in academic research and our focus groups exploring the issues with that. We found that failure is experienced by people at different career stages and identified suggestions for short, medium, and long-term strategies for depersonalising experiences of failure and recognising how it is a normal part of academia.
Department
Higher Education Sector
Wider Factors
Research Group
How
- Share experiences of failure by encouraging community members to explain how they deal with failure, offering support to others.
- Create safe spaces for reflection and provide regular opportunities to discuss failure during and after projects.
- Foster a supportive culture through making open discussion of failure a norm in team meetings to help everyone benefit.
Critical reflections Care will need to be taken to explicitly identify spaces in which sharing different responses to academic failure could take place and to ensure the spirit in which sharing was undertaken was appropriate. Leadership will be needed to increase a team’s confidence to take shared responsibility for failures and to foster a supportive culture.
Share
Openly share both successes and setbacks to help normalise failure
What the literature suggests Failure should be openly discussed in academic settings. Researchers are encouraged to avoid blame and reflect on how various factors contribute to outcomes. Creating a safe space for collective reflection during the process of failure helps manage emotional responses and encourages learning. Be empathetic and supportive. Sharing experiences and strategies for dealing with failure can support colleagues and students, creating a more resilient academic community.
Research Group
How
- Reflect on multiple factors and assess how different contributions or actions combined to cause the outcome.
- Celebrate failures that arise from experimentation and lead to valuable learning or skills development.
- Build critique of individualising failure into how feedback is structured and delivered.
Critical reflections It is important to recognise that people may respond to setbacks differently, and there will be a need to respect a diversity of reactions to non-success. Managers and peers will need to support people to take a balanced view i.e. so they do not avoid any part in their non-success, nor dwell or fixate on what they did “wrong”.
Responsibility
Avoid individualising responsibility and reflect on how different factors contributed to outcomes
What the literature suggests Failure should be recognised as a feature of academic life, not an accident or biproduct that can be corrected. By avoiding blaming individuals and reflecting on the many factors that shape outcomes, experiences of failure can be depersonalised. Researchers should be supported to undertake some riskier applications as a potential “intelligent failure” that will include valuable learning moments, regardless of outcome.
How
- Acknowledge structural constraints along with the role of external factors and chance in academic success.
- Develop grant writing skills by providing training and resources to help researchers communicate proposals.
- Foster collaboration, not competition through encouraging dialogue, experimentation, and "intelligent risk."
Critical reflections Many aspects of academic research are based on competition, so supporting staff to balance competition and collaboration is important. Greater recognition of flexible, bidirectional collaborations encouraging mutual learning across career stages and disciplines will allow shared ownership of successes and failures. Senior academics must recognise that failure extends beyond funding and publishing to include line management, duties of care, and culture-building.
Managerial and senior academics
Risk
Enable intelligent risk by making failure safe, discussable, and developmental
What the literature suggests Senior academics and managers should encourage a culture of collaboration and "intelligent risk", where failure is tolerated, discussed, and used as a learning tool. Regular discussions about failure will help early-career researchers overcome fear and share novel, innovative or ‘blue sky’ ideas.
Higher Education Sector
How
- Explore different ways to broaden how success and failure are defined and measured.
- Establish robust and diverse forms of mentorship programmes that are provided to academics at all levels.
Critical reflections A culture shift is needed so HE organisations can increase the support provided to staff who encounter and manage issues of “failure”. This includes what is discussed under the label of “failure,” which needs to be widened to include the sector’s management culture and emphasise the importance of fostering a safe and inclusive workspaces. This will include identifying and addressing what some perceived as “tolerated failures,” such as unconscious biases, questionable research practices, or (institutional) bullying and harassment.
Recognise
Success is contingent on high-quality mentoring and inclusive assessment
What the literature suggests Higher education (HE) organisations should acknowledge the value of failure as an integral part of academic development and communicate its role in the sector. HE’s promotion of good research culture should include broad assessments of researchers that recognise the links between success and the active provision of mentoring programmes and regular opportunities to explore career advice.
How
- Identify ways to share explanations for decisions publicly, with as much detail as helps researchers to understand what was successful and why.
- Organisations need to ensure they have internal mechanisms to evaluate their decision-making processes are transparent and explanations are reasonable.
Critical reflections Funders might be reluctant to publicly disclose rejection reasons for data protection or business sensitivity, or to avoid amplifying individuals' feelings of loss, shame or inadequacy. While important, these are issues to work through, not reasons to avoid explanations. Funding bodies should publicly explain mechanisms for reflecting upon and evaluating their decision-making processes, especially regarding success criteria, emerging biases or trends, and consequent changes.
Wider Factors
Training
Train peer reviewers and panellists to improve feedback and support research culture
What the literature suggests Higher Education (HE) and related organisations need to ensure mechanisms are in place to provide training for peer-reviewers, assessors and panellists to improve quality of feedback, in line with wider improving research culture policies.
How
- Normalise failure discussions throughout the faculty.
- Managers can create a culture of openness by leading discussions with examples of their (recent) failures.
- Foster collaboration, not competition by encouraging dialogue, experimentation, and "intelligent risk."
- Encourage "failure tolerance" through helping PhD students and early career researchers face their fears of failure.
Critical reflections Managers and senior academics must recognise the vulnerability in sharing failures. When reflecting on their own successes and failures, they should be transparent about the personal costs – and privileges – linked to success, including how surviving failure can depend on a track record of achievement. Equipping researchers to manage failure must go beyond sharing experiences to address its material and career impacts, including de-stigmatising the choice to leave academia.
Managerial and senior academics
Culture
Create a culture where failure is discussed openly and constructively
What the literature suggests Failure should be openly discussed in academia to help all researchers see it as a normal part of academic processes. Supervisors should manage expectations about rejections and the challenges of reaching top positions, while fostering solidarity and recognising structural constraints in academic careers. Acknowledge structural constraints. For example, recognising the role of external factors and chance in academic success.
Managerial and senior academics
How
- Supervisors can manage expectations by being upfront about the number and nature of rejections that can be experienced.
- Senior academics should seek to promote solidarity by including early-career researchers in project development, all stages of paper writing, and with career development.
Critical reflections Supervisors, managers and senior leaders will need support and training to be more sensitive to the causes of non-success of junior colleagues and to be flexible in the ways that they can support them. This will need to include being open to researchers considering alternative career paths (academic or otherwise).
Expectations
Senior academics should normalise the ways failure is a feature of academic work
What the literature suggests Supervisors should provide authentic support, focusing on communication, collaboration and flexibility. Creating a culture where failure is discussed openly and constructively allows everyone to benefit. Early-career researchers need more support to navigate the challenging academic landscape. For example, providing training and resources to help researchers communicate their proposals effectively for grants.
Higher Education Sector
How
- Develop metrics that value teamwork and that reflect the shared work and responsibilities involved in research.
- Identify ways to track the quality of support institutions provide that help researcher’s career progression and academic wellbeing.
Critical reflections The development of any metrics can have unintended effects upon that activity. Metrics will therefore need to be regularly updated. They will also benefit from being co-produced with researchers to ensure that the broader and more inclusive “indicators of success” are developed. HE needs to advocate for sustainable funding structures that allow for long-term investment in people’s research careers. To help demonstrate the need for this, HE will need to find ways to account for the financial and wellbeing costs upon individuals and the HE sector of current research processes.
Metrics
Emphasise measures that value process and collaboration
What the literature suggests The Higher Education sector should develop alternative metrics to measure excellence and success that reflect shared work and responsibility, while supporting career progression and academic wellbeing. Similarly, finding ways to value experimental and innovative ideas with longer-term, even unknown, benefits is needed. Workload models must recognise how failure is integral to research and allow time for it, including funded time between projects and grants, and opportunities to support wellbeing.
Individual
How
- Celebrate those who are open about and share their non-success.
- Identify ways you can value what you are doing – the new skills learnt, experiences you might have, connections you could make – outside of the final outcome.
- Be there for others – as a colleague, supervisor or mentor – and help others see the value of what they have done, whether they were funded, published or promoted.
Critical reflections Researchers will struggle to find the benefits of engaging in processes with low success rates if the outcome of non-success is likely to include loss of their job or curtailment of their career. Recognising and rewarding people for engaging in processes that have low success rates will need leadership to change the culture of academic research and broaden the metrics by which success is gauged.
Reward
Be rewarded for learning from failure by sharing lessons and experience
What the literature suggests Having funding applications, papers, or promotions that are not successful are a normal part of academic life. So we must recognise and reward people who engage in that process, independent from the outcome. By embracing and openly sharing failure, academics can foster a supportive network and work toward changing the perception of failure in academia.
Individual
How
- Reflect on what you can take responsibility for and how it is linked to what you can control.
- Identify patterns in your successes and failures.
- Discuss with trusted colleagues what the key learning points might be for you from any non-success.
Critical reflections It can be difficult to advise researchers to openly discuss failures when they are facing precarious contracts and the prospect of losing their job if they do not bring funding in or publish work. Individual academics will need support from all levels of HE to explore the constructive potential of failure so they can learn from it, grow through adversity, and identify paths for self-improvement. It is important to not place too much emphasis upon the individual researcher taking responsibility for non-success, when factors and decisions in academia are often beyond their control.
Reflect
Explore emotional responses without blame and encourage collective reflection
What the literature suggests Normalise perceptions of failure by openly sharing setbacks, not just successes, openly in professional settings. Reflecting how different factors contribute to outcomes might reduce the pressure to internalise blame. Rather than seeing outcomes as success or failure, adopt a flexible mindset to allow for growth and adaptability. Failure can be seen as an opportunity for self-improvement. Tracking both successes and failures may help gain a clearer view of the academic system.
Higher Education Sector
How
- HE should explore ways to provide more financial and wellbeing support for early-career researchers who are navigating the precarious academic landscape.
- Further consideration is needed of how different academic and research culture contexts (e.g., collaborative or competitive) interact with people’s ways of working and affect researcher’s wellbeing (loneliness and perfectionism).
Critical reflections Higher Education will need to identify the values associated with learning from failure that they want to promote, beyond simply promoting a “positivity” approach to failure. It will also include having a multifaceted view of what success is, beyond grant income and paper’s impact factors. Any consideration of what a good research culture looks like in practice will also need to recognise how it will differ not just for individuals, but for departments and disciplines.
Space
Support growth by creating nonjudgemental spaces where failure is openly recognised.
What the literature suggests Higher Education’s (HE) promotion of good research culture should include the need for a stable working environment. This includes providing more financial and wellbeing support for early-career researchers navigating the precarious academic landscape. HE organisations and funders should help researchers contextualise failure by being explicit about the key role that it has in the sector, as well as recognising their shared responsibility for any failures.
How
- Shift the conversation around grants by reframing funding applications as part of skills (not career) development, to help broaden understanding of success (recognising that good applications “fail”).
- Acknowledge and validate the emotional impact non-success and setbacks can have on researchers.
Critical reflections Opportunities to reflect and grow from failure are unevenly distributed. There will be multiple factors that affect a person’s capacity to learn from failure including their career stage, contract type, academic discipline or demographic characteristics. It will therefore be important to allocate time for all to staff, on all types of contract, to explore their non-successes. Building team confidence, promoting shared responsibility for outcomes, and offering career development advice will be critical steps for helping staff turn failure into meaningful growth.
Research Group
Learn to grow
Failure requires more understanding than success and provides opportunities to learn
What the literature suggests Academics should be rewarded for learning from failure, with safe spaces for sharing lessons and experiences. This allows everyone to benefit. There is a need to shift the conversation around grants and funding applications, where terms like "repurpose" and "salvage" fail to recognise the personal challenges of non-success. By recognising that "failure" includes "loss," the emotional impact on researchers is validated and given visibility.
How
- Identify ways to share explanations for decisions publicly, with as much detail as helps researchers to understand what was successful and why.
- Organisations need to ensure they have internal mechanisms to evaluate their decision-making processes are transparent and explanations are reasonable.
Critical reflections Funders might be reluctant to publicly disclose rejection reasons for data protection or business sensitivity, or to avoid amplifying individuals' feelings of loss, shame or inadequacy. However, these should be issues to work through, not reasons to avoid providing explanations. Funding bodies should publicly explain mechanisms they have to reflect upon and evaluate their decision-making processes, especially regarding success criteria, potential biases or trends, and consequent changes.
Wider Factors
Explain
Explore ways for funders to publicly share full explanations for funding denials to promote openness
What the literature suggests Organisations should seek to be more transparent about their decision-making processes at an institutional level, by making information about past funding decisions available to researchers and institutions. Funders and publishers should reflect on how their processes value the work they have solicited and explicitly recognise the worth of the researchers’ submissions even in the context of rejection.
How
- Encourage collaboration and flexibility by moving beyond asymmetric, research-focused relationships toward more adaptable, cooperative supervision.
- Support PhD and early-career researchers through seminar series on academic work challenges and strategies for managing emotional and material consequences.
- Develop grant writing skills through training to improve proposal clarity and effectiveness.
- Foster open, supportive supervisor-student dialogue through training in positive communication strategies.
Critical reflections Mentorship may be inconsistent across departments and disciplines, leaving some researchers without adequate support. The benefits of mentoring and coaching programmes are likely to be diminished if the wider research and HE environment that the researcher was working in remained unchanged.
Department
Supervision and Mentorship:
Recognise and support PhD students’ intellectual and emotional needs
What the literature suggests PhD supervision is evolving from one-directional to more supportive, two-way collaboration. Mentors can be important to helping academics at all stages of their careers manage failure. Mentorship and career guidance therefore should be available throughout people’s careers. Departments will need to ensure a range of mentorship programmes are made available to staff.
How
- Build supportive networks, including via social media, to connect with others in similar situations.
- Focus on the goals you set for yourself and avoid comparing yourself with others.
- View failure as an opportunity to learn about yourself, academic processes, and context in which you are working.
Critical reflections How people reframe failure will be affected by how the rejection is communicated and the context within which it is received. To make reframing meaningful, there will need to be accessible mentorship, capacity to experiment with novel approaches to research, and supportive institutional environments where openness about non-success is met with understanding rather than stigma.
Individual
Reframe
Reframing success and failure as shared can support a healthier research culture
What the literature suggests Instead of avoiding failure, focus on learning how to cope with and grow through it, as failure requires more understanding than success. Celebrate "intelligent failures" that helped develop valuable insights and improve skills. Embrace the learning process that comes with failure. For example, mentoring others, advocating for change and actively foster new conversations about failure in academia. Mentorship and peer support are crucial in helping contextualise setbacks and identify opportunities for development.
How
- HE to collaborate with funders, publishers, and learned societies to influence policy about how success and failure are understood as part of the academic process.
Critical reflections To help foster safe-to-fail research contexts HE will need to provide clear guidance on the nature of failure-focused discussions and how these can be conducted effectively. Funders, publishers and learned societies need to recognise the effects of their policies on shaping some of the fundamental aspects of research processes and behaviours. For example, as academic research diversifies, so too will the metrics and identifiers of success and failure. Research policy makers will need to give more attention to how multiple factors such as career stage, contract type, academic discipline or demographic characteristics intersect in perceptions and experiences of failure and who is seen as allowed to fail and who is not.
Department
Policy
Partner with funders, publishers and learned societies to influence research culture and policy
What the literature suggests Engaging with funders, policy makers, publishers and learned societies helps shape policy around the culture of research so that it is better able to recognise the integral role failure has in shaping academia. This should result in changes to how academics are evaluated. These bodies will also need to recognise the role of failure as an integral part of academic development, for example through “safe-to-fail” initiatives.
Wider Factors
HowHE sector to establish general standards for giving feedback that emphasise the need for providing specific, timely feedback on funding decisions, grant applications, and job interviews. Organisations that are providing feedback should develop guidance and rubrics to instruct reviewers and assessors so they are clear what is needed. Feedback should be monitored and reviewed for quality to identify areas for improvement. Organisations need to fully account for the time assessors, reviewers, or examiners put into evaluating researchers and their work, including in workload plans and via properly costed funding. Critical reflections Workload models and funding structures will need to be reviewed to reduce the dependence on non-costed (or unrealistic costing) of peer-review, assessment and evaluations. Otherwise the required thoroughness and timeliness of feedback is unlikely to be achieved.
Feedback
Give clear, detailed feedback on funding decisions
What the literature suggests Researchers need to be provided with clear, detailed and timely feedback on funding decisions, grant applications and job interviews. Feedback should be tailored to the specific context to maximise its usefulness. Panellists and reviewers will need to be incentivised to deliver consistent and constructive feedback within reasonable timeframes. Researchers should be able to safely share details of their non-successes as part of their evaluation, supervision or mentoring processes to support learning, improvement and the development of a positive research culture.
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Transcript
Managerial and senior academics
Research Group
Individual
Reframing failure in academia
By N. Thomas, C. Bernstein, A, Kenny, K. Haywood, F. Boardman, J. MacArtney
This infographic summarises key insights from our literature review on what has been written about failure in academic research and our focus groups exploring the issues with that. We found that failure is experienced by people at different career stages and identified suggestions for short, medium, and long-term strategies for depersonalising experiences of failure and recognising how it is a normal part of academia.
Department
Higher Education Sector
Wider Factors
Research Group
How
- Share experiences of failure by encouraging community members to explain how they deal with failure, offering support to others.
- Create safe spaces for reflection and provide regular opportunities to discuss failure during and after projects.
- Foster a supportive culture through making open discussion of failure a norm in team meetings to help everyone benefit.
Critical reflections Care will need to be taken to explicitly identify spaces in which sharing different responses to academic failure could take place and to ensure the spirit in which sharing was undertaken was appropriate. Leadership will be needed to increase a team’s confidence to take shared responsibility for failures and to foster a supportive culture.Share
Openly share both successes and setbacks to help normalise failure
What the literature suggests Failure should be openly discussed in academic settings. Researchers are encouraged to avoid blame and reflect on how various factors contribute to outcomes. Creating a safe space for collective reflection during the process of failure helps manage emotional responses and encourages learning. Be empathetic and supportive. Sharing experiences and strategies for dealing with failure can support colleagues and students, creating a more resilient academic community.
Research Group
How
- Reflect on multiple factors and assess how different contributions or actions combined to cause the outcome.
- Celebrate failures that arise from experimentation and lead to valuable learning or skills development.
- Build critique of individualising failure into how feedback is structured and delivered.
Critical reflections It is important to recognise that people may respond to setbacks differently, and there will be a need to respect a diversity of reactions to non-success. Managers and peers will need to support people to take a balanced view i.e. so they do not avoid any part in their non-success, nor dwell or fixate on what they did “wrong”.Responsibility
Avoid individualising responsibility and reflect on how different factors contributed to outcomes
What the literature suggests Failure should be recognised as a feature of academic life, not an accident or biproduct that can be corrected. By avoiding blaming individuals and reflecting on the many factors that shape outcomes, experiences of failure can be depersonalised. Researchers should be supported to undertake some riskier applications as a potential “intelligent failure” that will include valuable learning moments, regardless of outcome.
How
- Acknowledge structural constraints along with the role of external factors and chance in academic success.
- Develop grant writing skills by providing training and resources to help researchers communicate proposals.
- Foster collaboration, not competition through encouraging dialogue, experimentation, and "intelligent risk."
Critical reflections Many aspects of academic research are based on competition, so supporting staff to balance competition and collaboration is important. Greater recognition of flexible, bidirectional collaborations encouraging mutual learning across career stages and disciplines will allow shared ownership of successes and failures. Senior academics must recognise that failure extends beyond funding and publishing to include line management, duties of care, and culture-building.Managerial and senior academics
Risk
Enable intelligent risk by making failure safe, discussable, and developmental
What the literature suggests Senior academics and managers should encourage a culture of collaboration and "intelligent risk", where failure is tolerated, discussed, and used as a learning tool. Regular discussions about failure will help early-career researchers overcome fear and share novel, innovative or ‘blue sky’ ideas.
Higher Education Sector
How
- Explore different ways to broaden how success and failure are defined and measured.
- Establish robust and diverse forms of mentorship programmes that are provided to academics at all levels.
Critical reflections A culture shift is needed so HE organisations can increase the support provided to staff who encounter and manage issues of “failure”. This includes what is discussed under the label of “failure,” which needs to be widened to include the sector’s management culture and emphasise the importance of fostering a safe and inclusive workspaces. This will include identifying and addressing what some perceived as “tolerated failures,” such as unconscious biases, questionable research practices, or (institutional) bullying and harassment.Recognise
Success is contingent on high-quality mentoring and inclusive assessment
What the literature suggests Higher education (HE) organisations should acknowledge the value of failure as an integral part of academic development and communicate its role in the sector. HE’s promotion of good research culture should include broad assessments of researchers that recognise the links between success and the active provision of mentoring programmes and regular opportunities to explore career advice.
How
- Identify ways to share explanations for decisions publicly, with as much detail as helps researchers to understand what was successful and why.
- Organisations need to ensure they have internal mechanisms to evaluate their decision-making processes are transparent and explanations are reasonable.
Critical reflections Funders might be reluctant to publicly disclose rejection reasons for data protection or business sensitivity, or to avoid amplifying individuals' feelings of loss, shame or inadequacy. While important, these are issues to work through, not reasons to avoid explanations. Funding bodies should publicly explain mechanisms for reflecting upon and evaluating their decision-making processes, especially regarding success criteria, emerging biases or trends, and consequent changes.Wider Factors
Training
Train peer reviewers and panellists to improve feedback and support research culture
What the literature suggests Higher Education (HE) and related organisations need to ensure mechanisms are in place to provide training for peer-reviewers, assessors and panellists to improve quality of feedback, in line with wider improving research culture policies.
How
- Normalise failure discussions throughout the faculty.
- Managers can create a culture of openness by leading discussions with examples of their (recent) failures.
- Foster collaboration, not competition by encouraging dialogue, experimentation, and "intelligent risk."
- Encourage "failure tolerance" through helping PhD students and early career researchers face their fears of failure.
Critical reflections Managers and senior academics must recognise the vulnerability in sharing failures. When reflecting on their own successes and failures, they should be transparent about the personal costs – and privileges – linked to success, including how surviving failure can depend on a track record of achievement. Equipping researchers to manage failure must go beyond sharing experiences to address its material and career impacts, including de-stigmatising the choice to leave academia.Managerial and senior academics
Culture
Create a culture where failure is discussed openly and constructively
What the literature suggests Failure should be openly discussed in academia to help all researchers see it as a normal part of academic processes. Supervisors should manage expectations about rejections and the challenges of reaching top positions, while fostering solidarity and recognising structural constraints in academic careers. Acknowledge structural constraints. For example, recognising the role of external factors and chance in academic success.
Managerial and senior academics
How
- Supervisors can manage expectations by being upfront about the number and nature of rejections that can be experienced.
- Senior academics should seek to promote solidarity by including early-career researchers in project development, all stages of paper writing, and with career development.
Critical reflections Supervisors, managers and senior leaders will need support and training to be more sensitive to the causes of non-success of junior colleagues and to be flexible in the ways that they can support them. This will need to include being open to researchers considering alternative career paths (academic or otherwise).Expectations
Senior academics should normalise the ways failure is a feature of academic work
What the literature suggests Supervisors should provide authentic support, focusing on communication, collaboration and flexibility. Creating a culture where failure is discussed openly and constructively allows everyone to benefit. Early-career researchers need more support to navigate the challenging academic landscape. For example, providing training and resources to help researchers communicate their proposals effectively for grants.
Higher Education Sector
How
- Develop metrics that value teamwork and that reflect the shared work and responsibilities involved in research.
- Identify ways to track the quality of support institutions provide that help researcher’s career progression and academic wellbeing.
Critical reflections The development of any metrics can have unintended effects upon that activity. Metrics will therefore need to be regularly updated. They will also benefit from being co-produced with researchers to ensure that the broader and more inclusive “indicators of success” are developed. HE needs to advocate for sustainable funding structures that allow for long-term investment in people’s research careers. To help demonstrate the need for this, HE will need to find ways to account for the financial and wellbeing costs upon individuals and the HE sector of current research processes.Metrics
Emphasise measures that value process and collaboration
What the literature suggests The Higher Education sector should develop alternative metrics to measure excellence and success that reflect shared work and responsibility, while supporting career progression and academic wellbeing. Similarly, finding ways to value experimental and innovative ideas with longer-term, even unknown, benefits is needed. Workload models must recognise how failure is integral to research and allow time for it, including funded time between projects and grants, and opportunities to support wellbeing.
Individual
How
- Celebrate those who are open about and share their non-success.
- Identify ways you can value what you are doing – the new skills learnt, experiences you might have, connections you could make – outside of the final outcome.
- Be there for others – as a colleague, supervisor or mentor – and help others see the value of what they have done, whether they were funded, published or promoted.
Critical reflections Researchers will struggle to find the benefits of engaging in processes with low success rates if the outcome of non-success is likely to include loss of their job or curtailment of their career. Recognising and rewarding people for engaging in processes that have low success rates will need leadership to change the culture of academic research and broaden the metrics by which success is gauged.Reward
Be rewarded for learning from failure by sharing lessons and experience
What the literature suggests Having funding applications, papers, or promotions that are not successful are a normal part of academic life. So we must recognise and reward people who engage in that process, independent from the outcome. By embracing and openly sharing failure, academics can foster a supportive network and work toward changing the perception of failure in academia.
Individual
How
- Reflect on what you can take responsibility for and how it is linked to what you can control.
- Identify patterns in your successes and failures.
- Discuss with trusted colleagues what the key learning points might be for you from any non-success.
Critical reflections It can be difficult to advise researchers to openly discuss failures when they are facing precarious contracts and the prospect of losing their job if they do not bring funding in or publish work. Individual academics will need support from all levels of HE to explore the constructive potential of failure so they can learn from it, grow through adversity, and identify paths for self-improvement. It is important to not place too much emphasis upon the individual researcher taking responsibility for non-success, when factors and decisions in academia are often beyond their control.Reflect
Explore emotional responses without blame and encourage collective reflection
What the literature suggests Normalise perceptions of failure by openly sharing setbacks, not just successes, openly in professional settings. Reflecting how different factors contribute to outcomes might reduce the pressure to internalise blame. Rather than seeing outcomes as success or failure, adopt a flexible mindset to allow for growth and adaptability. Failure can be seen as an opportunity for self-improvement. Tracking both successes and failures may help gain a clearer view of the academic system.
Higher Education Sector
How
- HE should explore ways to provide more financial and wellbeing support for early-career researchers who are navigating the precarious academic landscape.
- Further consideration is needed of how different academic and research culture contexts (e.g., collaborative or competitive) interact with people’s ways of working and affect researcher’s wellbeing (loneliness and perfectionism).
Critical reflections Higher Education will need to identify the values associated with learning from failure that they want to promote, beyond simply promoting a “positivity” approach to failure. It will also include having a multifaceted view of what success is, beyond grant income and paper’s impact factors. Any consideration of what a good research culture looks like in practice will also need to recognise how it will differ not just for individuals, but for departments and disciplines.Space
Support growth by creating nonjudgemental spaces where failure is openly recognised.
What the literature suggests Higher Education’s (HE) promotion of good research culture should include the need for a stable working environment. This includes providing more financial and wellbeing support for early-career researchers navigating the precarious academic landscape. HE organisations and funders should help researchers contextualise failure by being explicit about the key role that it has in the sector, as well as recognising their shared responsibility for any failures.
How
- Shift the conversation around grants by reframing funding applications as part of skills (not career) development, to help broaden understanding of success (recognising that good applications “fail”).
- Acknowledge and validate the emotional impact non-success and setbacks can have on researchers.
Critical reflections Opportunities to reflect and grow from failure are unevenly distributed. There will be multiple factors that affect a person’s capacity to learn from failure including their career stage, contract type, academic discipline or demographic characteristics. It will therefore be important to allocate time for all to staff, on all types of contract, to explore their non-successes. Building team confidence, promoting shared responsibility for outcomes, and offering career development advice will be critical steps for helping staff turn failure into meaningful growth.Research Group
Learn to grow
Failure requires more understanding than success and provides opportunities to learn
What the literature suggests Academics should be rewarded for learning from failure, with safe spaces for sharing lessons and experiences. This allows everyone to benefit. There is a need to shift the conversation around grants and funding applications, where terms like "repurpose" and "salvage" fail to recognise the personal challenges of non-success. By recognising that "failure" includes "loss," the emotional impact on researchers is validated and given visibility.
How
- Identify ways to share explanations for decisions publicly, with as much detail as helps researchers to understand what was successful and why.
- Organisations need to ensure they have internal mechanisms to evaluate their decision-making processes are transparent and explanations are reasonable.
Critical reflections Funders might be reluctant to publicly disclose rejection reasons for data protection or business sensitivity, or to avoid amplifying individuals' feelings of loss, shame or inadequacy. However, these should be issues to work through, not reasons to avoid providing explanations. Funding bodies should publicly explain mechanisms they have to reflect upon and evaluate their decision-making processes, especially regarding success criteria, potential biases or trends, and consequent changes.Wider Factors
Explain
Explore ways for funders to publicly share full explanations for funding denials to promote openness
What the literature suggests Organisations should seek to be more transparent about their decision-making processes at an institutional level, by making information about past funding decisions available to researchers and institutions. Funders and publishers should reflect on how their processes value the work they have solicited and explicitly recognise the worth of the researchers’ submissions even in the context of rejection.
How
- Encourage collaboration and flexibility by moving beyond asymmetric, research-focused relationships toward more adaptable, cooperative supervision.
- Support PhD and early-career researchers through seminar series on academic work challenges and strategies for managing emotional and material consequences.
- Develop grant writing skills through training to improve proposal clarity and effectiveness.
- Foster open, supportive supervisor-student dialogue through training in positive communication strategies.
Critical reflections Mentorship may be inconsistent across departments and disciplines, leaving some researchers without adequate support. The benefits of mentoring and coaching programmes are likely to be diminished if the wider research and HE environment that the researcher was working in remained unchanged.Department
Supervision and Mentorship:
Recognise and support PhD students’ intellectual and emotional needs
What the literature suggests PhD supervision is evolving from one-directional to more supportive, two-way collaboration. Mentors can be important to helping academics at all stages of their careers manage failure. Mentorship and career guidance therefore should be available throughout people’s careers. Departments will need to ensure a range of mentorship programmes are made available to staff.
How
- Build supportive networks, including via social media, to connect with others in similar situations.
- Focus on the goals you set for yourself and avoid comparing yourself with others.
- View failure as an opportunity to learn about yourself, academic processes, and context in which you are working.
Critical reflections How people reframe failure will be affected by how the rejection is communicated and the context within which it is received. To make reframing meaningful, there will need to be accessible mentorship, capacity to experiment with novel approaches to research, and supportive institutional environments where openness about non-success is met with understanding rather than stigma.Individual
Reframe
Reframing success and failure as shared can support a healthier research culture
What the literature suggests Instead of avoiding failure, focus on learning how to cope with and grow through it, as failure requires more understanding than success. Celebrate "intelligent failures" that helped develop valuable insights and improve skills. Embrace the learning process that comes with failure. For example, mentoring others, advocating for change and actively foster new conversations about failure in academia. Mentorship and peer support are crucial in helping contextualise setbacks and identify opportunities for development.
How
- HE to collaborate with funders, publishers, and learned societies to influence policy about how success and failure are understood as part of the academic process.
Critical reflections To help foster safe-to-fail research contexts HE will need to provide clear guidance on the nature of failure-focused discussions and how these can be conducted effectively. Funders, publishers and learned societies need to recognise the effects of their policies on shaping some of the fundamental aspects of research processes and behaviours. For example, as academic research diversifies, so too will the metrics and identifiers of success and failure. Research policy makers will need to give more attention to how multiple factors such as career stage, contract type, academic discipline or demographic characteristics intersect in perceptions and experiences of failure and who is seen as allowed to fail and who is not.Department
Policy
Partner with funders, publishers and learned societies to influence research culture and policy
What the literature suggests Engaging with funders, policy makers, publishers and learned societies helps shape policy around the culture of research so that it is better able to recognise the integral role failure has in shaping academia. This should result in changes to how academics are evaluated. These bodies will also need to recognise the role of failure as an integral part of academic development, for example through “safe-to-fail” initiatives.
Wider Factors
HowHE sector to establish general standards for giving feedback that emphasise the need for providing specific, timely feedback on funding decisions, grant applications, and job interviews. Organisations that are providing feedback should develop guidance and rubrics to instruct reviewers and assessors so they are clear what is needed. Feedback should be monitored and reviewed for quality to identify areas for improvement. Organisations need to fully account for the time assessors, reviewers, or examiners put into evaluating researchers and their work, including in workload plans and via properly costed funding. Critical reflections Workload models and funding structures will need to be reviewed to reduce the dependence on non-costed (or unrealistic costing) of peer-review, assessment and evaluations. Otherwise the required thoroughness and timeliness of feedback is unlikely to be achieved.
Feedback
Give clear, detailed feedback on funding decisions
What the literature suggests Researchers need to be provided with clear, detailed and timely feedback on funding decisions, grant applications and job interviews. Feedback should be tailored to the specific context to maximise its usefulness. Panellists and reviewers will need to be incentivised to deliver consistent and constructive feedback within reasonable timeframes. Researchers should be able to safely share details of their non-successes as part of their evaluation, supervision or mentoring processes to support learning, improvement and the development of a positive research culture.