From Glue on Pizza to Missing Aircraft Bolts. 5 lessons from failure in 2024
2024 offered a great variety of failures from which we can learn.
In this year's final edition of the Friday Failure newsletter, I’ve chosen five high-profile failures to understand what we can learn. I must caveat up front that I have no inside knowledge of any of these events, so I can only observe like you and guess what has gone wrong.
But even if the analysis is off, I find the process of intentional reflection usually sparks an insight or reminds us of a previous lesson we may have forgotten.
Here are five lessons from failure in 2024.
1. AI Has a Long Way to Go: Google Recommends Glue on Pizza
In recent years, we have sat back in awe at just how quickly AI is advancing and become concerned that, very quickly, artificial general intelligence will exist and remove the need for humans entirely. But during the year, we were also reminded of how far AI has to go when, in May, Google released “AI Overviews” or a feature to summarise search queries.
Sounds great—until it tells you to put glue on your pizza, which is what happened when a user asked what to do about the problem of cheese falling off. Now, part of me thinks that maybe this was AI trying to expend with someone who would ask such a stupid question. But then I think about what one would find in my own search history and suddenly have empathy for the user.
What does all this tell us? I suspect an AI-controlled future may seem much closer than it really is, and that we need guardrails today. The consequences of a bad response to a question on pizza may not be that dire, but what about other applications of the technology? How will we know when it’s leading us astray?
2. Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast: Boeing’s Troubles
The topic of failure often lies below the surface. Take Boeing, one of America’s great industrial giants. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what the failure is, given there was an apparent succession of them: from planes falling out of the sky to staff claiming cover-ups, software failures, and industrial action.
Perhaps the defining moment in 2024 was when an exit door flew out of an Alaska Airlines flight in January. This wasn’t the failure I’d seek the lesson from, though. It was the aftermath that was really telling. The investigation into the incident was hampered by unwilling or uncoordinated management, lost paperwork, tales of poor safety behaviours on the shop floor, cost-cutting over years, and a cover-up.
The CEO stepped aside in August, but the company is still on the back foot. Quite remarkable for an industry famed for having systemic processes to unpick disasters and learn from them. In an organisation so large and complex, it’s not possible to narrow down to a single set of reasons. I’m reminded of the famous Peter Drucker quote: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” It seems that the actions of management over many years created a culture that could override documented processes and procedures—resulting in missing bolts in an aircraft door.
3. Good Storytelling is Required to Generate Action: The Post Office Scandal
For those in the UK, we can’t discuss failure in 2024 without mentioning the Post Office. More than 20 years of failings developed into a national scandal as the public became aware of how a flawed IT system created accounting errors for which innocent postmasters were blamed. The result ranged from public humiliation to lost livelihoods, and, very sadly, suicides in some cases.
Interestingly, the facts of the case had been known for years. So the failure that most drew my attention was: why did this not result in action sooner? It wasn’t until ITV dramatised the events in their groundbreaking series Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office that the public woke up. Immediately following the series, the former CEO was stripped of her CBE, and the Prime Minister rushed out new legislation to exonerate wrongly convicted sub postmasters.
The lesson here is that the story needs to be told well. Facts and inquiries weren’t enough. It took a TV drama to draw out the human impact of this scandal and strike at the emotional heartstrings of a nation for true action to be taken.
4. Great Customer Experience Is Not Enough: Cazoo Collapse
News also came this year with the collapse of the digitally advanced car seller Cazoo. I was particularly sad to learn about this, as I was a customer in 2020 and had one of the best purchasing experiences I can recall. I inspected the car online, secured finance, agreed on a trade-in price, and scheduled delivery—all in a few simple clicks.
But the collapse proves a fabulous customer experience was not enough. Despite their well-known reputation for excellence, the company seems to have overspent on things like sponsorship, expanded too quickly, and may have had an unsustainable cost base in areas like logistics.
As an advocate for customer-first thinking, this failure was a reminder to me: customer experience alone cannot be the only consideration. Balancing practical elements like cash flow and costs is equally critical.
5. We Can’t Rely on Regulation: Thames Water
Think about a business where your product is something people can’t live without, you have no competitors, and you have a stable business built up over hundreds of years. Sounds pretty good, right? Not the case for Thames Water, the UK’s largest public water utility.
This year, the extent of their debt burden became apparent, combined with a series of public failures—from sewage leaks into waterways to towns going without drinking water. The future of the company may be uncertain, but one thing is clear: the people of southern UK need drinking water and sanitation.
Apparently, a key barrier to servicing the debt is that water prices are regulated to protect the consumer. But where was the regulation to stop cash being drained and debt stockpiling? Once again, we learn that a small group of financially motivated parties can outwit those trying to protect the masses.
