Admitting failure is hard, but as academics we should learn to fail better

Failure is an inescapable part of any undertaking. However, in academia failure is rarely discussed or systematically approached. Drawing on her own experience of ‘failure moments’, Rachael Hains-Wesson discusses how applying Theory of Change models to academic projects can drive improvement in research practices and enable research to respond to failure in-the-moment, rather than in retrospect.