AC Discussion | 10,000 Ways to Fail
On April 11th, Noni Williams, G. Anthony Galdamez, Ken Heinze, and Carlie Waganer sat down for a conversation about how we define and assess what constitutes failure in creative processes that hinge on investigation, discovery, and uncertainty. They talked about the joys of following imperfect lines of inquiry and celebrated the mistakes, goofs, miscalculations, screw-ups, let-downs, and all the other many spectacular ways in which we fail, as places to start rather than signals to end.
Carlie Waganer, Noni Williams (from left to right)
Title of Discussion: 10,000 Ways to Fail
Panelist 1: Noni Williams
Panelist 2: Ken Heinze
Panelist 3: Anthony Galdamez
Moderator: Carlie Waganer
Date of Discussion: April 11th, 2025
List of Acronyms: [NW] = Noni Williams; [KH] = Ken Heinze; [AG] = Anthony Galdamez; [CW] = Carlie Waganer; [PF] = Peter Fankhauser
Transcript
[PF] Welcome everybody. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started. My name is Peter. I work here at Amplify and it’s great to have you all here for tonight’s Alternate Currents panel discussion, 10,000 Ways to Fail with our panelists Noni Williams, Anthony Galdamez, and Ken Heinze and our moderator Carlie Waganer. They’ll introduce themselves to you in just a minute.
Before that, a big thank you to Omaha Public Library for hosting us today and for anybody who’s new to Amplify, we’re an Omaha area nonprofit that works to support artists working across disciplines to explore liberatory ideas that move our community forward. We do that through public art projects, exhibitions, and Alternate Currents, an alternative to a conventional MFA program that includes an artist cohort, arts publishing, and discussions like this one.
10,000 Ways to Fail is also connected to an exhibition organized by our moderator Carlie Waganer called The Failure Collective, A Collection of Failures, which opens tonight at 6pm at Generator Space, our project space on 18th and Vinton. Please come if you’re free!
Our panelists will be in conversation with each other for 40- or 45-minutes discussing failure as a generative tool in exploratory creative and research-based practices. After that, we’ll open the floor to questions. I’ll also mention quickly that a video and transcript of tonight’s discussion with links to additional articles and more resources will be posted to the Alternate Currents Blog in a couple weeks. You’ll be able to find it, and a lot of other great discussions like this one, on our website at amplifyarts.org.
So, thank you all again for being here. We really appreciate your participation and willingness to engage in critical discussion with us. Thank you to the Nebraska Arts Council, and Nebraska Cultural Endowment whose support makes Alternate Currents programming possible. And with that, I’ll pass it over to Carlie.
[CW] My name is Carly Wagner. I am the residency coordinator at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. I'm so happy to be here to talk to you guys about failure. A lot of my perspective on failure comes from my role as an arts administrator. In an experimentally focused residency program, I get to watch and revel in all of the different experiments that our residents go through.
Personally, I’m also a weaver and experience a lot of failure in that way. When I was reflecting on how to start out this conversation, I was thinking, moderators usually talk about why they're qualified to be in the position they are, but there's simply not enough time to talk about all my failures, personal or professional or otherwise. So, I want to go through some of my failures just today. So far, I have stapled to catalogs incorrectly. I tripped while walking my dog and messed up my brand-new shoes. I plugged in a USB port to try to get a video to play this morning and it did not work. In fact, it straight up said “failed to playback.”
Did I learn something from them? Maybe one or two things, but they were simple fixes. We're here today to talk about some not so simple fixes and the idea of failure more expansively. How can we use failure and how does it shape our lives? I'm joined by a group of people today who think about failure probably as much as I do, and before we start the discussion, I'm going to let them all introduce themselves. Please tell us your name, pronouns a little bit about your relationship to failure, and how you’ve failed today.
[NW] Okay, I'll start. My name is Noni Williams. Pronouns, they/she and one of my failures is that I already forgot the second part of that question. Oh yeah, I remember. So, I put this pin on wrong as soon as Carly handed it to me and I was like, “Well, that's appropriate”. It says, “I failed today.” If you cannot see it, it is upside down, so I can read it–that's important for me. Failure is important to me. And a lot of the things that I do working as a senior data professional, we have to fail to find a way to succeed. I’m also a writer and I started playing rugby this year and there's been a lot of failure, a lot of learning in that, and I think we all will dig into it with these questions. That's where I'm starting from.
[KH] Hi, I'm Ken Heinze. I'm the lab coordinator at Metro Community College’s Prototype Design Lab. We are a space that's open to the public. You can join as a member, and we can show you how to use one of a couple of hundred machines to realize your ideas and learn about how the equipment can help you do that. Failure every is part of every single day, every single interaction somebody has in the lab. They have to start somewhere! I find people learn a lot from controlled failure. We kind of bracket it. We narrow in. We'll do a little experiment. It fails. We learn from that, and we try to build from it. And we define success in those terms. Personally, I fail left and right. My family loved that I was going to speak about failure here. They were cracking up the whole time. They were like, “How appropriate.” I think that speaks for itself.
[AG] Anthony Galdamez. I work at Kiewit Luminarium and manage the multiple different programs you see there and the research side of that. I'm also a scientific astronaut candidate, and there's a lot of failure in that. Everything I've done in life; I can pretty much connect it to the growth that comes from failure and I’m excited to be here.
[CW] Thank you all so much. I'm going to dive into some of our questions. To start, I think often, and across so very many disciplines, failure is considered a bad word. How do you define and assess what constitutes failure in your specific fields? And how do you work to challenge, question, or queer the notion of failure as inherently negative and reposition it as a generative point of departure instead?
[NW] So, I work as a senior cloud data engineer at Blue Cross Blue Shield, where I train data analytics apprentices and associate software developers. That means that I am in a space where I am training people to learn new things and I need them to try something, fail, and see why something went wrong so that we can understand that and address it if it ever happens again, but also so that we can move forward and continue to learn new things. You all have learned things before you are here because you learned something. I saw most, if not all of you walk in here. That was a learning experience. I am speaking in English, and if you are understanding me, that is something that you had to learn as well. There are so many things that I don't think that we consider as learning because we picked it up a while ago and now we do it without thinking about it.
That's how I feel about my role in tech. I'm teaching something to do something that I learned how to do a while ago. It's not something that I have to think about as much. I want other people to get to a place where they are trying and failing enough times that it feels natural, that it feels like learning, so that they can move on to the next thing instead of being met with the negative emotional experience that sometimes comes with acknowledging failure. That is probably the biggest barrier my apprentices have to overcome. You can have your emotional experience. I will not deprive you of that. But you also have to get beyond it to a place where you recognize that failure is a part of learning. I needed you to fail. I need you to walk through this process. That is a huge part of what I do every day.
Noni Williams, Ken Heinze, Anthony Galdamez (from left to right)
[KH] I'm right there with you on that. People have to be able to make their own mistakes while learning new things, because that's the only way they’re going to prevent those mistakes from happening again. I think a hands-on, repetitive experience really helps with that. Whenever something goes wrong in the lab, I like to pause, reboot the computer, and start over from the beginning so we're taking all those initial steps from the start to build that muscle memory and loop those brain patterns brain paths through repetition.
[AG] Yeah, I was a public-school educator for about 12 years and failure as a bad word is a pretty big thing in school. I think that we normally pour our emotions right into failure, and that makes it a harder thing to work through, but it is part of the scientific process. You're looking for an outcome and sometimes the outcome is to fail so it’s difficult to separate the emotional side of failure from its place in the process because you’re jumping between two different cognitive worlds.
[NW] Right. I think the emotional side of failure is something that I've had to consider a lot working with other people because a lot of that emotional experience with failure is learned. Maybe a concept in school wasn’t explained to you in a way you understood. And maybe you were crying at the kitchen table with your parents coming down on you. And maybe you get an F on your homework, or on a test, and experience the punitive side of failure. There is often a penalty for it in academic spaces. I think when we meet failure with more acceptance, and frame it as learning, we can iterate and celebrate it as a tool so that people have fewer formative, negative emotional responses to failure.
[CW] We do have these really wide-ranging experiences with failure and so much of it comes down to our formative years as learners. That brings me to my next question, which shifts from how we perceive failure as individuals to our collective perception as a society, particularly in our hyper individualistic and aggressively capitalist Western context, which asserts that orderliness, precision and perfectionism are the dominant paths toward success. Can you talk about ways you challenge the success / failure binary and lessons you've learned by pursuing messier or imperfect lines of inquiry, investigation, descent
[AG] I think the big one is knowing that failure is not a direct journey. We have to be able to open up and say, “Hey, I failed here. This didn’t work in this moment but that’s just for right now.” And then you shelve it and then come back to it later and try again. Having that messy complex to it is an important piece because if you think that it's only pass or fail, then you’ll never try something that didn’t work the first time again. The messy side of it is processing the multiple ways we fail and the emotions that come with that. We need to make room to do that processing, so we don’t look at failure like it’s a terminal thing and sit in that world forever.
[KH] I like Bob Ross. When he paints and has a “happy little accident,” he turns it into a whole new realm of possibility and exploration. I think we have to ask who defines success? Is it yourself? Isn't the world around you? Is it your job? Is it your students? I was seven years old when I got called into the principal's office for being messy and I said, “I'm an artist.” He said, “You'll never be successful with that. You better work on your math.” I'll never forget that, and I've been driven by it. I want to get outside the line that divides success and failure and challenge the people and things that tell us we have to keep the beat; we can’t screw up.
[NW] I love math, and I love to talk about math. I also write poetry, but I write poetry about math. It's all connected. One of the things that I love about math, especially the abstract part of math that looks at how we engage with the phenomena around us, is that one of the core principles is that the universe tends towards chaos and entropy is its natural state. So, when I think about orderliness, I am brought back to the principles of mathematics that I've learned, where there is a certain amount of entropy that is created whenever we do anything. In one of my favorite information theory classes, we calculated the amount of entropy that is created when you engage in all types of different activities.
When you place a bet, depending on how big the bet is, this is the amount of chaos that you are engaging in. When I write a piece of code that can compress the entire text of War and Peace, including all the characters capitalization, punctuation, and everything else, this is the amount of entropy that's created. When you are sending a text message from one place to another, this is the amount of entropy created. And when you get into the back end of how we exist technologically (a lot of our lives are being considered by a computer scientist), varying degrees of entropy in everything we do means that things are going to fall through. That’s a fact of our existence.
When we see that chaos and messiness are at the core of what we do, we understand how our world holds together. Sometimes we can’t see it clearly because capitalism demands we optimize our outputs to optimize profits. That economic model causes us to divest our entire existence from what is really happening in this universe. There is messiness everywhere and being told that we can't participate in it is a lie. Messiness is a universal truth.
[CW] Right. And that messiness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Successes and failures rarely, if ever, happen in isolation. When we look at the physical sciences and fluid dynamics, more specifically, the success or value of each part isn’t measured against other parts of the system. Instead, they work in tandem. Some grow large, while others diminish, and then they’re pulled back into equilibrium at some point. Can you talk about how that kind interdependence shows up in your work? Have your failures helped somebody else succeed?
[KH] Well, when I'm working with a new student, we have to start with the basics and build to whatever success looks like for them. That's my favorite part of the job because it's almost like a spiritual feeling where you're building momentum for the first time. And I wanted to build on that thought to say well, I'm going to get back to it in a minute. I forgot what I was going to say. There's the chaos. I was going to say I think about chaos a lot, because almost everything that can go wrong will go wrong and when that happens, you're looking for some sort of NorthStar or point of reference to guide you through. I think that point lies in the center of the chaos like the eye of a storm. That's where everything kind of slows to a halt. So, I'm always looking for that point of calm where I can start afresh again.
[CW] You all teach in some capacity. What situations have you encountered where you're teaching from your own failures? Are there times when you're teaching what you think you know and failing while teaching it?
[NW] So true. I also work with the Nebraska Writers Collective as a teaching artist. I think this is my tenth year with them. I have worked with a lot of high school students who will sit down in front of a prompt and say, “I have nothing to write. I don't have anything to say. There are no words.” I tell them, “That's not true, because you just said so many words to me.” And they’ll start writing and think it’s bad, so we get into the conversation about what makes a piece of writing bad. When they can't share what they deem a bad piece of writing in a space where they have made friends, a space where it’s okay to fail, it’s because they ascribe a moral value to it.
It's like, we don't have to do that. It's just a poem. It’s not that deep. It's just words in this room for now. And then once you're done, that's gone. It already happened. It's in the past. We are on to a new moment. I love to tell my poets that we cannot edit a draft that doesn't exist. So, whatever it is, just write it down and we can start from those words. Even if it's just a couple. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking. It just had to exist. Then, we can try to either make it what we want it to be or try something else. But either way, we are trying, and we are sharing and we're supportive.
[AG] There's a movie called Minecraft that just came out. As an educator, I was put into a Minecraft educator program and learned how to do stuff in the game that could make it really cool for students. This was a while ago, back in 2015. It was on a Saturday, and I’d been working all week on lesson plans and grading and everything and came to this professional development thing that was basically eight hours straight of building a Minecraft city with a team. We were all sitting there working and the teacher had all the screens up and they could see everything. So, I was putting all this stuff together and feeling like I'm getting the hang of this thing and as I'm doing that, one of the team members was already putting up, you know, five-thousand-foot walls. As they were going through, I was like, “I wonder what this block does.” And when I touched it after we'd been working for hours, all I heard was somebody go, No! What did you do?” My computer was running slow, so I didn't see anything weird on my end, but I looked up and the whole town we had been working on was a giant crater.
I fitted a TNT block because I thought it looked cool. When I was putting it up, it started blinking. I tried to turn it off, but if you play the game, you know you can't do that. So, it exploded and turned our city into a giant crater after almost six hours of team gameplay. You can guess how the other teachers reacted. And I remember the emotional state of knowing I messed up and knowing I messed up other people’s game. Part of your professional life as an educator is knowing that your mess ups have a real impact on others. So, failure becomes connective tissue and you’re always thinking, “Who else am I letting down?” It heightens your sense of responsibility to others. I had a responsibility to my students who were really into Minecraft and really wanted to do it. That meant I needed to let my failure sink in and then come back and learn more about the game so I could help them and so I wouldn't blow up another city.
[KH] That’s a good example. I bet you probably taught your fellow teachers some patience too. It’s a little like that in the lab, because we have machines that are dangerous, so everything has to be done with an eye toward safety. We have to control a certain amount of what happens to make sure nothing catastrophic happens and to make sure nobody gets hurt physically.
When people come in with a project, instead of going with your first gut instinct, I like to ask them to think through how they’re going to solve potential issues that might come up. Let's think of five or six ways we can address those problems and build new sets of information that will get us where we want to go. Let's step back and consider all the ways we can get to the same place using different tools or different materials or different methods.
[NW] So for me, it's important to create a space where failure is not only allowed but encouraged so we can learn what it looks like, iterate on it enough so that it feels comfortable, and then try again. I want my apprentices to think through how certain processes happen. How did something get to a place where it wasn't working? How did we solve it? And what can we do in the future to make sure that this works the next time? I don’t want them to avoid failure or engender a culture where they feel like they can’t try. I don't want to talk about avoiding failure. I want to talk about how failures get us to solutions.
I fail all the time. I love doing working sessions where they can see me trying to solve something because I'm going to fail. And I have no problem with that. When they ask questions I can’t answer, I have no problem saying, “I don’t know, but we can look it up together and you can help me find the answer.” They may see something that I don't. I am not the holder of truth. I just happen to have been doing this work longer. I might get the answer faster but that does not make me better at it. We're not putting any moral judgment on it. If you get it done before me, great. I love that. If I get it done before you, great. Let's talk about that and let's learn from it and let's move on to the next thing.
When we were talking about working in teams, I was thinking about my first rugby game not that long ago. I learned so much. There were so many plays where the whistle blew, and the penalty was on me. I put those in my back pocket and tried to apply them and move on. Being able to take that feedback and say, “Okay, I'm going to apply this because I don't want the game to be over.”
[CW] It’s really important to cultivate safe spaces to fail. These are learning opportunities for sure, but we also need safeguards and practices and trials where we’re empowered to try and fail over and over again. That seems like a good place to open it up to questions.
[Audience Member] I love this concept of creating safe places for failure and even encouraging it. There is this collective conundrum of living in a paradox where perfectionism and urgency can lead to feeling like we have to get things right the first time and we can’t fail. Are there examples you can think of where failure is incentivized or rewarded?
[AG] I think knowing that somebody is rooting for you to fail and to learn something from it is a reward in itself. We don't normally say that out loud but, as an educator, that verbal confirmation is important when working with students. They have to hear someone say that it’s okay to fail. It’s not the end of the world. We can try again. It creates a human connection that makes learning from our failures even more meaningful.
[NW] I think the reward for failure is innovation. In the tech space, there are incentives and bonuses for innovating. But to innovate, you have to have a space where you're allowed to try and to fail. We have to keep up with how technology is changing. Part of our schedules have to be dedicated to learning new things and there is going to be failure in that. Like how can I make sense of this and not feel like me not being good at something the very first time is a failure? I saw a friend posting about rugby, and she'd been doing it for almost a decade, and I thought I’d try it because in a team context, you share failures and successes. It's a shared win or loss. I love the culture of rugby because success means playing together. Regardless of who wins or loses, it’s like, Today's a great day because we played rugby. That culture has helped me understand and acknowledge where success and failure sit in me and how I interact with them.
[Audience Member] My daughter got a scholarship to attend the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and to keep her scholarship, she has to maintain a certain grade point average which makes her hesitant to take courses she’s not confident she’ll excel in. You’ve talked about creating spaces where failure is encouraged, but how do you navigate spaces where it’s not safe to fail?
[AG] That’s a great question. I think the internal process of how we perceive failure is a big part of it because we're all different levels. How do we, as a society, start to look at failure as a beginning, not an end. Universities should be places where that happens. But they also cost a lot of money. I think, from an education standpoint, we have to look at failure as a necessary part of building resilience and preparing young adults to open themselves up to new experiences and perspectives.
[NW] I think a lot of that is dependent on finding what feels safe for you. I don’t want to call it fortitude, like you have to be strong, but while you’re learning, you should be able to be yourself and build internal channels for processing feedback. Ask how you can improve. Like, if what I'm doing is not what you want, I need you to be specific with me. Then, I can decide what I need to feel secure in my failures, protect myself, and keep moving forward
[Audience Member] What does that internal processing look like when you're failing every job in succeeding relationships and vice versa?
[NW] I cry. It’s that emotional release, I cry a lot. I write a lot. And then I take my notebook to the bar, and I write and cry. I have to get those feelings out and ask what success really means. It’s a constant reframing of what success and failure mean. Is this a manageable failure? Am I using my support systems? Am I leaning on community to help me feel full in other ways? We are people and we deserve to be in community.
[AG] I definitely double down on my support systems. Sometimes we have our supporters and sometimes we don't. It's very difficult to balance personal and professional successes and failures. The stars don’t always align perfectly to achieve a perfect equilibrium. You might have to lean on home or work more at different times and vice-versa. And there are lots of people who don't have that support to back them up. For those individuals, it's tougher. But I do think that finding your community and having shared interests can be a huge help, even if you don’t have family support or support from your co-workers.
[KH] When I'm at my lowest, I look for somebody to help. I know so many people have it worse than I do. I volunteer or try something new to expand my boundaries. Most of all, I just try to be aware of who's hurting and go in that direction first.
[CW] I think that is a great place to end the conversation for now. Thank you all so much for being here today and making this a space where we can talk about failure openly and freely and celebrate the new places it takes us. Thanks again everybody.
*This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
About the Panelists:
Ken Heinze is from Chicago where he attended Columbia College and served as a shop assistant and apprentice glassblower. He is now the Prototype Design Lab coordinator at Metropolitan Community College.
Anthony Galdamez is an educator, NASA Solar System Ambassador, and Program manager at Kiewit Luminarium. He is passionate about STEAM and strives to inspire learners of all levels working to explore and understand their worlds. He is a military veteran and holds a Master;s in Education with a concentration in STEM. He is also a certified NASA Endeavor instructor from Columbia University.
Noni Williams (she/they) is a senior data professional, a STEM communicator, a teaching artist, a poet, a mathematician, a philosopher born and raised in North Omaha, Nebraska. Noni has created an intentional space for the exploration of mathematical concepts like fractals and AI as a tool for understanding generational patterns in their poetry, and through collaborations within the community as a queer, Black artist and overall tech baddie. She spends most of her time mentoring, fencing, learning rugby, and fostering the joy of learning in others. Williams is a 2024 Ten Outstanding Young Omahan, 2024 Ten Outstanding Young American, and has created work featured by Opera Omaha, Kiewit Luminarium, Juneteenth JoyFest, AfroFest, Omaha Diversity Experience, Silicon Prairie News, JCI USA, and others.
About the Moderator:
Carlie Waganer is a collector, weaver, and perpetual novice. She received her BFA in Fiber arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her work has been shown at Distillery Gallery, Gallery@ArtBlock, Women’s Studio Workshop, Store_Space Gallery, and the Nichols House Museum. Waganer has worked as an administrator at residency centers in Tennessee, New York, and now Nebraska. In her professional life, she considers herself an “artistic administrator,” where the support of artists and the realization of their goals are integral to her own artistic fulfillment. Her material practice includes categorizing, collage, coding, baking, drawing, fabric manipulation, journaling, list-making, marbling, and weaving. She is mostly interested in interconnectedness and impermanence.