Fiasco Repository: Tools and activities to support an error-friendly research culture

A collection to inspire researchers and researcher developers

We provide here a community-generated collection of resources for the better handling of failure in academia. The collection process is ongoing and can be found on this pad. This website provides a stable URL to pass on to people who might need it (last transfer from pad: Sep 1, 2026).

The collection was started in advance of VitaeCon 2024 in September 2024 by Taryn Bell (Leeds), Anna Pilz (Edinburgh), and Johanna Stadlbauer (RCC, Graz), and continued during the Fiasco Fest Goes Arqus European University Alliance project (10/2024-09/26), and subsequent workshops. Contact for questions: rcc@uni-graz.at.

This collection is structured by 'type' of resource, e.g.:

  1. Examples of best practice
  2. Podcasts (further down)
  3. Further reading (much further down)
  4. Ideas for activities created during different workshops

 

SECTION 1: PRACTICE EXAMPLES

 

Fiasco Fest Workshop at University of Graz

Since 2022, yearly in winter, an interdisciplinary group of ca. 20 pre- and postdoctoral researchers from all the universities in Graz come together for a festive and enlightening night, guided by Sabine Bergner, a psychologist who specialises in leadership, and together work out how to productively approach those Fiasco-like experiences which are a normal part of an academic career.

The workshop encompasses:

  • building a "rejection CV"
  • creating a twilight exhibition in the room using perceived successes and perceived misfortunes
  • approaching psychological and other determinants by which we experience something as a "fiasco"

Using their own examples, the participants worked out a number of ways of dealing with these experiences; learning from them, integrating them, letting them go, moving on. The night ended with an exercise in "letting go" and some drinks, snacks and laughter.

contact: rcc@uni-graz.at

 

Failing Forward video series on YouTube

Contact: Nicola Simcock, Research Culture Manager, Newcastle University: nicola.simcock@ncl.ac.uk, read more: https://from.ncl.ac.uk/how-do-we-destigmatise-failure-in-the-research-environment?utm_source=advocacy&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=employee-advocacy&blaid=6682286

Failing Forward is a collaborative project between Newcastle’s Research Funding Development and Research Culture teams. The project aims to confront the topic of failure by showcasing community members sharing their experiences and, importantly, how they deal with failure to help other colleagues and students.

Creating a culture that normalises and embraces ‘failure’ and sees it as a valuable part of learning, is an action in Newcastle’s institutional Research Culture Action Plan. The Failing Forward videos are a starting point toward that goal. While they won’t necessarily change the deeply ingrained ‘culture of success’ that might feel familiar, we hope that they can be used to start a conversation about the realities of failure.

 

But What if I Fail...? A workshop for researchers on reframing risk and boosting resilience. 17 April 2024, Edinburgh, seen here announced by Orla Kelly, University of the West of Scotland: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7175462283647537152/

Are you interested in exploring the entrepreneurial world but feeling a bit apprehensive? It’s completely normal to feel nervous about doing something outside your comfort zone. But any entrepreneur, including all the guests on The Academic Adventures Podcast, would tell you that what scares you today won’t scare you tomorrow, as long as you keep taking steps towards your goal.

This workshop will unpack some of the things that might be holding you back. It will also explore how to build personal and professional resilience to help you deal with the inevitable challenges we all face. Hopefully you’ll leave feeling a bit more confident with a few more tools in your toolbelt.

Led by the Academic Adventures podcast host and trainer Sarah McLusky, this workshop will include a variety of engaging activities including personal reflection, group tasks and discussion. It is aimed at Early Career Researchers of any discipline.

The morning workshop will be followed by a panel discussion with some of the guests on the Academic Adventures podcast.

Proudly supported by the Scottish Ecosystem Fund 2023-24

Scottish Enterprise, The Scottish Government

 

Graduate Center-Salon: Scheitern in der Wissenschaft ("Salon: Failure in Academia") at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

9.10.2024, 6pm, Munich

Learn from mistakes, develop a positive culture of errors, see failure as an opportunity? Seven professors from LMU will show this evening that this is possible. In seven minutes each, they will give an insight into their very personal failure stories.  In keeping with the motto of this year's doctoral day, "Fair doctorates", the GraduateCenterLMU wants to help overcome fears about the topic of "failure in science". Idealized career paths and strong beliefs continue to shape the image of a successful academic career: uncertainty and (self-)doubt are seen as weaknesses, and dealing openly with setbacks seems too risky. It is therefore often difficult, especially for young researchers, to accept mistakes and criticism as scientific normality and to openly discuss their own insecurities. There is often little room for nuances in everyday research.

Inspired by the Fuckup Nights that have become popular in the startup scene, the evening event provides insights into the "engine room" of successful research and highlights the value of failure in science. The audience is invited to share in the personal, human side of failure as a scientific normality and to be encouraged and inspired by individual strategies for dealing with pressure to succeed and setbacks.

 

Responding to change or setbacks: Resources from Oxford University Careers Service

OVERCOMING A SENSE OF ACADEMIC FAILURE - a workbook created at the University of Oxford by Emily Troscianko and Rachel Bray and was last updated in June 2023. We encourage you to take notes while you read, and to make a point of turning some of your notes into actions.

Many of us have phases where we have no idea what we’re doing, or everything feels like it’s going wrong: that we are failing, or even that we are failures. Sometimes such phases feel less like phases than a permanent default. And often we assume – wrongly – that no one else ever feels the same.

This is an initiative intended to help make it OK to think and talk about failure. It grew out of an event held in June 2016 which brought together DPhil students, early-career academics, and researchers at later stages of their careers in academia or beyond, for a frank conversation about academic failure and success. The event made clear how powerful it can be to acknowledge perceived failures, talk about them, reframe them, and learn from them, rather than bottling them up and pretending they never happened.

 

Festival of Failures at Loughborough University:

From YouTube, 05.06.2024

The opening plenary session of the Festival of Failure is an opportunity for all to meet, connect and discuss notions of failure across the university’s disciplines; to consider how its disadvantages can be minimised and some of its potential benefits exploited.   Recent events show how failure can affect entire nations as well as individuals be it physically, socially or mentally. From the world’s conflict zones and the migration of peoples, to the welfare of athletes and management of crime, across society and countries there is a pattern of failure to act or failure from acting. With the current Horizon scandal at the Post Office being a prime example. Failure in sport can be understood from the sub-cellular level up to and including failures of governance within organisations such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA.   This multi-scale view of failure will be highlighted in this introductory session where four international fellows have been invited to focus discussions on the language and psychology of failure, the failure to tolerate exercise from the cellular to the whole organism level, failure in conflict and philosophical belief systems: alongside system failures in engineering and software. Here the session is opened by Professor Ksenia Chmutina, Director of the IAS, Professor Dan Parsons, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation and Dr Michael Shaw, one of the Festival of Failure leads.

 

Rejection Spreadsheet and Party

For research groups or whole schools: Everyone who gets rejected for a grant (or anything else you determine party-worthy) logs it into the spreadsheet, and when you hit a certain number, you host a celebration.

Rhaina Cohen (Jan 21, 2022): A Toast to All the Rejects: What a shared rejection spreadsheet taught me about success, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/01/celebrate-your-rejections-failures/621327/

 

FailSpace toolkit to help you TALK ABOUT and learn from failures

Failspace is an AHRC-funded research project exploring how the cultural sector can better recognise, acknowledge and learn from failure

failspaceproject.co.uk

In this pack you will find a series of tools intended to help artists, organisations, participants and funders have more open and honest conversations about failures. There are four stages and five tools, as outlined below. The next few pages explain what the tools are and how you can use them, with suggested activities to guide your thinking / help you lead a workshop, alongside suggested timings. However, this guide is not intended to be prescriptive and there will be many other ways to use our tools to start conversations about failures. So please use them in whatever way works best for you or even design your own tools.

 

A CV of failures, Melanie Stefan, Nature volume 468, page

More on it: 2017: This Princeton Professor's CV of Failures Is Something We Should All Learn From

 

SECTION 2: PODCASTS

Research Culture Uncovered, Episode 114: How to Handle Professional Failure

Research Culture Uncovered, Episode 97: Navigating Failure in Academia

11th December 2024 University of Leeds Podcast

Research Culture Uncovered, March 27, 2024, University of Leeds Podcast

From setback to success: supporting researchers after unsuccessful funding applications with Anna Pilz

Research Culture Uncovered, March 20, 2024: Exploring Grimpact: The Other Side of Research Impact with Gemma Derrick, https://player.captivate.fm/episode/3055bf9f-a833-49e0-bf62-27abfbc36098

Feb 11, 2020: Episode 6 – Dealing With Rejection, The Professor is In Podcast,Karen Kelsky https://theprofessorisin.com/podcast/episode-6-dealing-with-rejection/

 

 

SECTION 3: FURTHER READING

Journal of Trial and Error: https://journal.trialanderror.org/

Borgstrom, E., Driessen, A., Krawczyk, M., Kirby, E., MacArtney, J., & Almack, K. (2024). Grieving academic grant rejections: Examining funding failure and experiences of loss. The Sociological Review, 72(5), 998-1017. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261231207196

Gaillard, Stefan et al (2022), 'Ten Simple Rules for Failing Successfully in Academia', PLOS Computational Biology, https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010538 

Darcy Gillie, Sep 2, 2024: Failure: We're doing it wrong

Kay Guccione, Feb 2024, Where do narratives of ‘failure’ come from? In: The Auditorium: a research culture and researcher development blog, https://theauditorium.blog/2024/02/15/where-do-narratives-of-failure-come-from/

Loveday, Vik (2017): Luck, chance, and happenstance? Perceptions of success and failure amongst fixed-term academic staff in UK higher education, In: British Journal of sociology, Vol96/3https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12307

Jaremka, Lisa M. et al. (2020): Common Academic Experiences No One Talks About: Repeated Rejection, Impostor Syndrome, and Burnout, In: Perspectives on Psychological Science Volume15, 3, 519-543. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1745691619898848?journalCode=ppsa

Glass, R.L. (2000): A letter from the frustrated author of a journal paper, In: Journal of Systems and Software, volume 54, issue 1, p.1. https://ciencias.ulisboa.pt/sites/default/files/fcul/outros/A-Letter-from-the-Frustrated-Author-of-a-Journal-paper.pdf

Humbert, Anne Laure (2024), 'The secret to acaedmic "success": failing often', LinkedIn blog. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/secret-academic-success-failing-often-anne-laure-humbert-pgp1e/?trackingId=11Q2Y0poSf%2BsUlBhHNCJMw%3D%3D

Lixinski, Lucas (2023), 'Narrating Failure in Academia: Turning Trash into Treasure', Times Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/narrating-failure-academia-how-turn-trash-treasure

Pilz, Anna, '#ResearcherRealities: Unsuccessful Grants and What to do with them', #ResearcherRealities: Unsuccessful grants and what to do with them – IAD4RESEARCHERS (ed.ac.uk)

Stadlbauer, Johanna (2025) Fiasco Fest: What a party-workshop can do for a more failure-friendly research culture, in: Personal in Hochschule und Wissenschaft entwickeln, Band 9, September 2025, Heft 4, Here from page 320: Artikel - Service | BiblioScout

 

SECTION 4: Ideas from Vitae2024> Forum of failures and fiascos workshop, Sept 23, 2024

Idea creation on how to celebrate failure in academia:

  • aknowledge the differring stakes: high stakes for precrity, fellowship apps, submission of phd thesis: mistakes rather than failure, presence of an  emotional safety net, age, gender, background can influence impact, pregresive failures, repreated little failures eat away at your resilience, schooling and money as safety nets for taking risks, emotional investment into an endeavour differes, career/economic/emotional/

Activities proposed in ideation session:

  1.    highlight those who remained unscuessful - coaching conversations, get institution to acknowledge their ongoing contributions 
  1. Workshop on an established scholars rejected/reviewed journal submissions reviewer comments, show & engage with reviewer comments and think through feedback 
  1. Problem for PhD candidates: phd supervisors dont adequately handover between candidates, university newly established. programme to train supervisors mandatory last year, get a years worth of training to make them effective supervisors
  1. Current frameworks make failures inevitable, focus on those who left academia - testimonials who share what their transition beyond academia went like, presenting more than a success narrative 
  1. full journey of paper rejections as your email signature; open lists  with numbers of rejections, realities of publishing your work need more transparency

 

SECTION 5: Ideas from RD&Tea, 16 June 2025

The power of music: (celebrate the) small wins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qddDPAWYOng

I often used the quote from a shakira song "Birds don't just fly, they fall down and get up. Nobody learns without gettin' it wrong"

In case someone wants to check out our Fiasco Fest project: Fiasco Fest Goes Arqus - Information und Service für PostDocs: Fiasco Fest Goes Arqus - Information und Service für PostDocs https://postdoc.uni-graz.at/de/fiasco-fest-goes-arqus/

maybe one practical thing to do would be to have a Slack channel/morning pages type channel where people can post any small success they've had

We encourage researchers to develop a 'brag book' to make a physical record of any achievements (however small) from not just their academic experience that they can look back on - often we overlook the small things that are part of the longer journey

There was a suggestion from someone about having ritual/celebration related to the activity e.g. appling for job, submitting paper, getting an interview...regardless of what the outcome(s) of the above are 

How is "failure" in itself recieved as a term- does it envoke shame/failure in the people we work with? Are there other terms that can be/should be used?