Honorable Failure: A Practical Guide to Harakiri

Colonel Timothy Kirk
The Senior Afghan Hand
ISAF Joint Interagency Task

              Honorable Failure: A Practical Guide to Harakiri

Who doesn’t like a good Samurai tale of legendary honor?  Who can resist the appeal of a culture dripping with the nobility of Bushido – the way of the warrior?  Most folks can recite the storyline of the dishonored medieval Japanese warrior by heart: the disgraced, noble fighting man in ceremonial dress would kneel, draw his short tanto blade, and reverently plunge the knife into himself.  In committing this final ritual act of Seppuku (or Harakiri to us foreigners who read the letters backwards), a warrior could restore lost honor for a variety of failings by sacrificing his own life.  The implication of such a brutal and terminal practice is clear: true honor demands great sacrifice, a warrior must preserve it through the most serious means, and the notion of honorable failure is unthinkable.

Yet while myths of Bushido practices and codes abound, we now know that much of this “history” was not a medieval tradition as much as it was a modern distortion carefully crafted to exploit people.  The term Bushido wasn’t even really used much until the 20^th Century to support a specific agenda.  In the years prior to World War II, Japanese Imperialists created propaganda using Bushido legends as role models for Japanese citizens.  It certainly got men fired up to fight, but it also did a lot of harm to society.  In fact, it likely cost Japan dearly during the war.  The Bushido ethos resulted in fighter aircraft designed without safety features or self-sealing fuel cells, naval vessels without fire control equipment and procedures, and a de-emphasis on tactical communications—not to mention an unwillingness to negotiate terms in obvious strategic defeat.  How did Bushido create such harm?  The answer provides an excellent example for those of us interested in the study of how failure impacts our character.

Japanese myth-builders created an extreme notion of character and honor.  Warriors were expected to be self-sacrificing, lone-wolf-minded, and fatalistic.  The Emperor needed them to defeat the enemy, but should the enemy manage to win a battle, he expected warriors to accept their fate with silent, noble “honor” to the ultimate extent.  They dealt with failure through an arcane expectation of self-destruction.  If a warrior lost a fight, they wasted no time in accepting their ritualistic duty within the context.  It was better to die in battle than to return home with the shame of defeat.  The Bushido made failure in performance a moral equivalent of a fatal failure in character.  The impact was final.

The resulting mindset made learning very difficult.  Loss was not seen as an avenue for introspection and study, but a fatal blow in itself.  The implications meant that routinized attempts at saving defeated warriors’ lives were themselves shameful efforts.  Engineering, weaponry, tactics and operational design all bore the moral burden of this mythos—life was not worth preserving if damage came at enemy hands.  Bushido limited prospects for success by inculcating a spirit in men that obliged them to think about the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong way for success.  Performance suffered, and authentic character died.

Today, we don’t observe mythological doctrines, yet we still contend with the question of how to deal with failure, and it is helpful to draw a distinction between failure in performance and failure in character.  The lesson of the Bushido myth suggests we pay close attention to the nature of failure’s causes; while failure in performance can certainly result from failure in personal character, it is not always the root cause.  At the same time, it should remain among the suspects.  Misattribution of the causes lead to future failures, so success requires honest intellectual rigor.  When failure occurs, consequences certainly follow and must be accepted.  Those consequences may be dire, but they should never be so extreme that they are fatal to our learning.  Any intellectual, emotional or actual version of Harakiri upon failure distracts us from determining if such a causal relationship truly exists and how it can be fixed. 

As it was for the Imperial Japanese military, proof of character can be found in real-world performance.  Yet an idealized form of character that looks good on paper is no substitute for results in the field.  Positive results are the product of years of learning, trial and error, and observation.  Failure is an important part of that process because it draws our attention to lessons we must learn.  If we abort the learning process, we disrupt and limit performance.  If our intention is to perform well, whatever the context, learning from failure becomes a paramount virtue.  Dealing with small failures as they occur can also prevent much larger failures down the road.  The practice of ignoring or forgetting performance failure invites catastrophe and erodes personal character.

Character failures can be just as catastrophic and yet are far more insidious.  Lapses in integrity, stewardship and other elements of personal character are hard-to-see and hard-to-admit root causes of failure.  While these kinds of failures are hard to confront, even world-class performance cannot overcome uncorrected character flaws.  We must consider character implications in every failure and do our best to fix any errors we find.  Shouldn’t we expect such errors?  The truth is that all men are corruptible.  Good character is the exception to humanity’s rule.  None of us can expect personal perfection.  If we intend to improve upon that condition, it is important to admit the truth and realize that we commit ourselves to high moral standards in opposition to our own nature.  That is not to suggest we should tolerate such failures.  Tools do exist that help us to achieve excellent character in our lives; but lofty idealism, unrealistic expectations and mythic notions are not among them.  Accountability, transparency and authenticity are far more valuable and effective for this purpose, and with them our character can improve even in the midst of failure.

As leaders, we must contend with the reality that failure both reveals and impacts our character.  Self-destruction cannot restore lost honor, but the self-awareness failure produces can help us improve our character, developing honorable virtues like humility and perseverance.  The best leaders are not those who never fail, but rather those who perform and deliver despite many failures.  While Samurai folklore may have us believe that the only virtue in failure is in the Harakiri, the truth is the opposite. Failure has value not in the termination of thinking, but in the inspiration of thinking, and the latter is the beginning of honorable failure.