Dr. Melisa Buie is an operational excellence leader and co-author of Faceplant: FREE Yourself from Failure's Funk. She has a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan, taught graduate engineering courses at San Jose State University, and has worked at semiconductor and photonics companies including Lam Research, Coherent, and Applied Materials. She is also the author of Problem Solving for New Engineers.
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Melisa's favorite mistake is one she didn't recognize until ten years after the fact. After publishing her first book while juggling a full-time job, teaching, and raising her son as a single parent, she was exhausted -- so she did nothing to market or promote it. She told herself she had earned the rest. What she actually did, she now sees, was choose invisibility. The lesson wasn't that rest is bad. It was that she had mis-timed it, treating rest as the finish line instead of part of the cycle.
In this conversation, Mark and Melisa get into why platitudes like "fail fast" and "fail forward" tend to fall flat, why pre-mortems can prevent faceplants that postmortems can't, and the four autopilot reactions Melisa calls the Conspirators -- the machine, the magician, the statue, and the satellite. They also explore how separating the facts of a failure from the story we tell ourselves about it is often the difference between getting stuck and getting free, what happens when organizations inadvertently create cultures where failure isn't safe, and how AI can be a thinking partner in problem solving rather than a replacement.
