Failingfor

Failingfor is a neologism describing the intentional act of allowing or inducing failure in a task, system, or performance to achieve a defined objective. The concept is used across fields such as software engineering, education, and performance studies. In practice, it can involve deliberate underperformance, fault injection, or exposing vulnerabilities under controlled conditions to study outcomes or provoke a response from observers.

Origin and usage: The term emerged in online discourse in the early 2020s, though exact origins are unclear. It is used as both a verb and a gerund, for example in phrases like failingfor exercises or teams that engage in failingfor to test resilience.

Applications: In software engineering, failingfor often aligns with fault injection and chaos engineering, aimed at validating error handling and systemic resilience. In education and training, instructors use failingfor-style exercises to teach recovery procedures and decision making. In performance art and social experiments, failingfor may be used to reveal biases in judgment or to simulate real-world frictions.

Ethics and reception: Critics warn that deliberately provoking failures can confuse participants, waste resources, or raise ethical concerns if consent and safety measures are not clearly established. Proponents argue that controlled failure can improve systems and understanding when properly scoped and documented.

Related concepts include fault injection, chaos engineering, deliberate practice, and performative failure.