You know, Herman, I was thinking about that taxi ride Daniel mentioned in his prompt. It is such a visceral example of how we often ignore our intuition in the moment, only to realize later that all the warning signs were flashing red right in front of us. It is that feeling in the pit of your stomach that you dismiss as being tired or being dramatic, but your subconscious is actually processing data faster than your conscious mind can keep up with.
It really is. And for those just joining us, I am Herman Poppleberry, and this is My Weird Prompts. We are on episode six hundred forty-four today, which is a bit of a milestone in itself. Our housemate Daniel sent us this prompt about learning from failure, and he shared that story about a truly sketchy taxi ride from Ben Gurion airport here in Israel. It is a perfect micro-example of what we are talking about. You have the initial gut feeling when you see the car, the mounting evidence as the driver swerves through traffic on Highway One, the communication breakdown in the back seat between Daniel and his wife, and then the eventual realization that a mistake was made in even getting into that car. It is a sequence of events that feels like a blur when you are in it, but when you look back, it is a series of very distinct decision points.
Right. And Daniel was asking for a framework or a template to actually document these things. Because usually, we just survive the experience, breathe a sigh of relief, and then never think about it again until the same thing happens six months later. We treat these failures as isolated incidents of bad luck rather than data points for future improvement. We have this tendency to want to bury the embarrassment or the fear as quickly as possible. But Daniel wants to do the opposite. He wants to exhume the failure and perform an autopsy.
Exactly. And that is where the shift in thinking comes in. Daniel mentioned the Fuckup Nights here in Jerusalem, which is a real movement that has gained so much traction over the last decade. It actually started in Mexico City back in twenty twelve and spread to over three hundred cities globally. The idea is to destigmatize the mistake by sharing it publicly. But talking about it on a stage with a beer in your hand is one thing. Actually building an internal system for analyzing those failures in the cold light of day is another. We need to move from the emotional reaction of oh that was terrible to the analytical perspective of what were the conditions that allowed this to happen. We have to treat ourselves like scientists observing a failed experiment.
I like that distinction. Because if you just stay in the emotional space, you either blame yourself, which leads to shame, or you blame the universe, which leads to bitterness. Neither of those helps you next time. So, if we are going to build a framework for Daniel, or for anyone listening who wants to handle their blips and setbacks better, where do we start? Do we look at existing industrial models, or something more personal?
I think we have to look at where this is done best, which is often in high-stakes environments like aviation, medicine, and software engineering. In those fields, a mistake is not just a bummer; it is potentially catastrophic. But we can translate those heavy-duty industrial tools into a personal template. The most famous one, and perhaps the gold standard for simplicity, is the After Action Review, or the A-A-R. It was developed by the United States Army in the nineteen seventies to help soldiers learn from combat simulations and real-world engagements. It is incredibly simple, which is why it works. It consists of four basic questions. One, what was supposed to happen? Two, what actually happened? Three, why did it happen? And four, what are we going to do next time?
It sounds almost too simple, but I can see how it forces you to be objective. It strips away the adjectives and focuses on the verbs. Let's apply that to Daniel's taxi story just to see how it works in practice. Question one, what was supposed to happen? A safe, routine ride from the airport to Jerusalem at five in the morning. Question two, what actually happened? An erratic driver, high stress, a near-miss with a truck, and a premature exit from the vehicle at a gas station. Now, question three is where it gets interesting. Why did it happen?
Right, and in a formal A-A-R, you do not just say because the driver was crazy. That is a lazy answer. You look at the systemic reasons. Why did they choose that specific taxi? Daniel mentioned the airport is supposed to vet them. So, there was a failure in the vetting process or a failure in Daniel and his wife's decision to trust the rank blindly. They noticed the driver was aggressive and the car was dented before they even got in. So, the why includes ignoring the initial red flags due to exhaustion and the desire to just get home. The why also includes the social pressure of not wanting to cause a scene at the taxi stand.
And then question four is the takeaway. Next time, if the driver looks aggressive or the vehicle looks poorly maintained at the rank, they wait for the next one or they take the high-speed train, even if it is less convenient. It sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but how often do we actually write that down? If you do not write it down, it is just a memory. If you write it down, it becomes a policy.
Almost never. And that is the problem. Without documentation, the lesson stays in the realm of vague intuition rather than a concrete rule. I think for a personal framework, we need to add a bit more nuance than just those four questions. If I were designing a template for Daniel, I would add a section for precursors. What were the small signs that preceded the failure? In complex systems research, we talk about the Swiss Cheese Model. This is a concept that has saved countless lives in hospitals and cockpits.
Oh, I remember you mentioning this before. That is the one by James Reason, right? He was a professor at the University of Manchester.
Yes, exactly. Imagine several slices of Swiss cheese lined up. Each slice is a layer of defense or a safety measure. The holes in the cheese represent weaknesses in those layers. Usually, the holes do not line up, so a mistake is caught by the next layer. But occasionally, all the holes align, and the failure passes through every single layer. In the taxi case, layer one was the airport vetting. Layer two was their own observation of the driver's demeanor. Layer three was the ability to speak up immediately when the driving got bad. All those holes aligned that morning at five in the morning when they were exhausted. The exhaustion was the thing that made the holes in the cheese bigger.
That exhaustion is a huge factor. That is a precursor. So, if we are building a template, the first section should be the context. What was the environment? Were you tired? Were you rushed? Were you under pressure from someone else? Because failures rarely happen in a vacuum. They happen when our defenses are down. If we can identify the context, we can recognize when we are in a high-risk state for making bad decisions.
Precisely. And then we move into what I call the Five Whys. This is a technique developed by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. It is used in the Toyota Production System to get to the root cause of a problem. You do not stop at the first answer. You ask why four more times. It is like a toddler who keeps asking why, but with a professional purpose.
Give me an example of how that works in a different context. Let's say, a minor blip at work. You missed a deadline for a project that you usually handle easily.
Okay, let's try it. Why did you miss the deadline? Because the final report was not finished on time. Why was the report not finished on time? Because I was waiting for data from the marketing department. Why were you waiting for data from marketing? Because I only asked them for it two days before the deadline. Why did you only ask them two days before? Because I did not realize how long their processing time was. Why did you not realize their processing time? Because we do not have a shared calendar or a standard operating procedure for data requests.
So the root cause is not that you are lazy or that marketing is slow. The root cause is a lack of a shared process. That is a much more fixable problem than just saying work harder or be better. It takes the personality out of it and puts the focus on the architecture of the work.
Exactly. And that is the power of the retrospective. It moves the focus from the person to the process. In the tech world, we call this a blameless post-mortem. John Allspaw, who was the Chief Technology Officer at Etsy, wrote a very influential blog post about this back in twenty twelve. The idea is that if you punish people for making mistakes, they will just hide the mistakes next time. They will get very good at covering their tracks. But if you assume that everyone involved was trying to do a good job with the information they had, you can actually find out what went wrong with the system. You create psychological safety, which is a term coined by Amy Edmondson at Harvard. It is the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.
I think that is a crucial point for Daniel's framework. It has to be blameless, even when you are doing it for yourself. If your retrospective is just a list of ways you are a failure, you are going to stop doing retrospectives very quickly. It becomes an exercise in self-flagellation. You have to treat yourself like a well-meaning employee of your own life. You were doing your best, but the system failed. How do we upgrade the system? How do we give the employee better tools?
I love that phrasing. You are the C-E-O of your life, but you are also the frontline worker. If the worker fails, the C-E-O needs to look at the training and the tools, not just fire the worker. So, if we are putting together a template, let's call it the Personal Growth Retrospective. We have the Context, the Five Whys, and then I would add a section for Second-Order Effects. This is something people often miss.
Explain what you mean by that in this context. I know second-order thinking is big in investment circles, but how does it apply to a personal mistake?
Well, every failure has a cost, but every fix has a consequence too. If Daniel decides he will never take a taxi again and will only take the train, the second-order effect might be that he spends three extra hours traveling every time he goes to the airport. Is that a price he is willing to pay? Or maybe the fix is just a more rigorous five-second check of the driver. If you over-correct, you create new problems. We need to think about the implications of our lessons. A lesson that makes your life significantly harder might not be the right lesson.
That makes sense. You don't want to over-correct. It is like when a city puts up a stop sign at an intersection because of one accident, but then that stop sign causes a massive traffic jam two blocks away that leads to three more accidents. You have to weigh the solution. You want the minimum effective dose of a fix.
Exactly. Now, what about the minor blips? Daniel mentioned those too. I think for the small things, a full A-A-R or Five Whys might feel like overkill. If you spend an hour analyzing why you forgot to buy milk, you are going to burn out. You will spend more time analyzing your life than living it. For the minor stuff, I recommend a Weekly Delta.
A Weekly Delta. I assume delta meaning the mathematical symbol for change?
Yes. At the end of every week, maybe on Sunday afternoon, you just look at two things. One, what went well that I want to repeat? We often forget to analyze our successes. And two, what was a delta, a change, or a friction point? You do not have to do a deep dive. You just acknowledge it. I forgot the milk twice this week. Why? Because I did not check my list before leaving the office. Fix? Put a reminder on my phone that triggers when I leave the building. Done. It takes thirty seconds, but it prevents the same minor annoyance from happening for the third time.
I think that is very practical. It is about building the muscle of reflection. If you only do retrospectives when your life is on fire, you are going to associate them with trauma. You will avoid them. If you do them when things are going okay, you become a more resilient person overall. It becomes a routine, like brushing your teeth.
And you start to see patterns. That is the real secret of documentation. If you have a folder or a notebook of these retrospectives, you might notice that eighty percent of your blips happen on Tuesday afternoons. Then you can ask, what is happening on Tuesdays? Oh, I have that four-hour meeting that drains my brain and leaves me in a state of decision fatigue. Now you have a real insight. You can plan for that. You can decide not to make any major life decisions on Tuesday evenings.
That brings up a good point about the actual format. Daniel asked for a template. If you were going to sit down today and write a retrospective for a significant setback, how would you structure the document? Let's give him the actual headers.
Okay, let's get specific. I would use a digital document or a dedicated notebook. Header: Date and Event Name. Section one: The Narrative. Write out what happened as if you are telling a story to a friend. This gets the emotional energy out. It allows you to vent. Section two: The Facts. List the timeline, the people involved, and the specific outcomes. No opinions here, just data. At four-thirty A-M, we landed. At five-fifteen A-M, we entered the taxi. Section three: The Analysis. This is where you do the Five Whys and the Swiss Cheese Model. Section four: The Root Cause. Summarize the one or two systemic issues. Section five: Action Items. These must be specific, measurable, and time-bound. Not I will be more careful, but I will download the train schedule to my home screen.
I like that. The transition from narrative to facts is very important. It is like a police report versus a diary entry. You need both to understand the full picture. The narrative gives you the subjective experience, and the facts give you the objective reality. And the action items are the most important part. Without them, you are just ruminating. Ruminating is just spinning your wheels in the mud. Action items are the traction.
Precisely. And I want to add one more thing that I think is overlooked in these frameworks. The Pre-mortem. This is a concept from Gary Klein, a research psychologist who studies decision-making under pressure. Instead of waiting for things to fail, you imagine a future where they have already failed.
Oh, that is clever. So you are doing the retrospective before the event happens. You are traveling through time.
Yes. You say, okay, it is six months from now and this project has been a total disaster. Why did it fail? Your brain is actually much better at finding flaws when it is looking backward, even if the backward is imaginary. It is a psychological trick called prospective hindsight. It bypasses our optimism bias, which is that little voice that tells us everything will be fine because we want it to be fine.
I can see how that would have helped with the taxi. If Daniel had said, okay, imagine this ride is a nightmare. Why would that be? Well, the driver looks angry, it is dark out, we are exhausted, and we haven't checked the car's license plate. Suddenly, the risks are much clearer. You can mitigate them before they happen. You can decide to take a different car before you even put your luggage in the trunk.
Exactly. It turns intuition into a proactive strategy. If you are enjoying this deep dive into the mechanics of failure, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It genuinely helps other people find the show and join the conversation. We are trying to build a community of people who are okay with being wrong as long as they are learning.
It really does. And speaking of the conversation, I want to go back to the idea of the blips versus the major setbacks. I think there is a danger in treating every minor mistake as a failure of the system. Sometimes, a blip is just a blip, right? Sometimes the universe is just chaotic. How do you know when it is worth the effort of a full retrospective?
That is a great question. In engineering, we use the concept of a threshold. If a service goes down for five seconds, we might just ignore it if it only happens once a year. That is noise. If it goes down for five minutes, we investigate. For personal life, I think the threshold is repetition or impact. If a mistake costs you more than a certain amount of money, time, or emotional distress, it gets a retro. If it has happened three times in a month, no matter how small, it gets a retro. Repetition is the universe trying to tell you that there is a hole in your cheese.
That is a solid rule of thumb. It prevents the analysis paralysis. Now, what about the human element? Retrospectives often involve other people. Daniel was in that taxi with his wife. How do you do a collaborative retrospective without it turning into an argument about who was more wrong? How do you avoid the blame game when you are both stressed?
This is where the blameless part becomes absolutely essential. You have to establish the ground rules before you start. You say, the goal of this conversation is not to figure out who messed up. The goal is to figure out how we can avoid this stress next time. You use I statements. I felt nervous when the driver swerved, and I realized I did not know how to tell you that without making the driver more aggressive. You focus on the shared goal of safety and peace of mind.
That is a very different conversation than why didn't you say something? Or why did you pick this driver?
Exactly. One is an attack; the other is a design problem. If the problem is that we do not have a way to communicate secretly in a taxi, that is a solvable problem. Maybe you have a code word. Maybe you have a shared note on your phones where you can type to each other. You are solving for the future rather than litigating the past. You are teammates against the problem, not opponents against each other.
I think that code word idea is actually quite brilliant. It sounds a bit like something out of a spy movie, but in a situation where you feel unsafe but do not want to escalate, it is a very practical tool. It is a direct result of a good retrospective. It is a small change that can have a massive impact on your safety.
It is. And it shows that the best lessons from failure are often very small, very specific tweaks to our behavior. It is not about a total personality overhaul. You don't need to become a different person. You just need a new habit or a new tool. It is about incremental improvement.
So, to summarize for Daniel, we are looking at a three-tiered approach. For the minor blips, a Weekly Delta. Just a quick check-in on what to change and what to keep. For the significant setbacks, a formal Personal Growth Retrospective with a narrative, facts, Five Whys, and specific action items. And for future projects or high-stakes situations, a Pre-mortem to catch the holes in the Swiss cheese before they align.
That is it. And the most important part of any of this is the documentation. Whether it is a digital folder on your computer or a physical notebook on your nightstand, you have to have a place where these lessons live. Otherwise, you are just relearning the same lessons over and over again, which is the most expensive way to live. It is a waste of your most precious resource, which is time.
It really is. I am thinking about how this applies to our own work on this podcast. We have been doing this for over six hundred episodes. We must have had hundreds of these little retrospectives along the way, even if we did not call them that. We have changed our recording process, our editing workflow, even how we research.
Oh, absolutely. Remember episode one hundred twelve when the audio quality was terrible because we forgot to check the gain settings on the new interface? That resulted in a permanent checklist that we still use today. Every single time we record, we check the gain. That is a direct result of a failure that we documented and fixed. We turned a moment of frustration into a permanent improvement.
I remember that. I was so frustrated I wanted to delete the whole thing. But now, I do not even have to think about it. The system handles it. And that is the goal, right? To free up your brain from worrying about the things you have already solved so you can focus on new challenges.
Exactly. You want to make new, more interesting mistakes. If you are still making the same mistakes you were making five years ago, you are not failing effectively. You are stuck. You want to be failing at a higher level. You want your failures to be more sophisticated.
Failing at a higher level. I like that as a goal. It acknowledges that failure is inevitable, but it suggests that the nature of your failures should evolve as you grow. It is a sign of progress.
Precisely. It is about increasing the complexity of the problems you are capable of mishandling. If you are failing at a multi-million dollar business, you have successfully moved past the stage of failing to pay your utility bill. That is progress. Your problems are a reflection of your level of operation.
That is a very optimistic way to look at it, Herman. I think Daniel will appreciate that. It takes the sting out of the word failure. It becomes just another word for feedback. It is just the universe giving you a status report.
It really is. In the world of cybernetics, which is the study of control systems, feedback is everything. A system without feedback is a system that is out of control. It will eventually destroy itself. Failure is just a very loud, very clear form of feedback. The more you listen to it, the more in control you become.
I want to touch on one more thing before we wrap up. The historical context of this. It feels like we are in a moment where this is becoming more mainstream, especially with the rise of data-driven self-improvement in the twenty twenties, but has it always been this way? Were people doing retrospectives in the nineteenth century?
That is an interesting question. I think in a formal sense, no. But if you look at the journals of people like Benjamin Franklin, he was doing a form of this every single day. He had a list of thirteen virtues, things like temperance, silence, and order. Every night he would mark down where he failed to live up to them. He was doing a daily retrospective. He even had a little chart. It was very data-driven for the eighteen hundreds. He understood that you cannot improve what you do not measure.
So he was the original self-tracker. Long before smartwatches and apps.
He really was. And he understood that self-improvement is a process of constant course correction. You are never perfectly on track. You are just constantly nudging yourself back toward the center. He wrote in his autobiography that while he never reached perfection, he was a better and happier man for having made the attempt.
I think that is a great image to end on. We are all just like a ship in the ocean, constantly being pushed off course by the wind and the waves, and the retrospective is our way of checking the compass and adjusting the rudder. It is not about being perfect; it is about being aware.
Beautifully put, Corn. And Daniel, thank you for the prompt. It gave us a lot to chew on. I hope that taxi ride is the last scary one you have for a long time, and I hope the framework helps you turn that stress into something useful.
Definitely. And for everyone listening, if you want to find more episodes or get in touch with us, you can head over to our website at myweirdprompts dot com. We have the full archive there, and a contact form if you have a topic you want us to dive into. We love hearing your stories, even the sketchy ones.
You can also find us on Spotify and pretty much anywhere else you get your podcasts. We are here every week, exploring whatever weird and wonderful ideas come our way. We appreciate you being part of this journey with us.
This has been My Weird Prompts. I am Corn.
And I am Herman Poppleberry.
We will see you next time.
Goodbye everyone. Keep learning from those blips.
