Getting failure right
I have just finished watching Ted Lasso, a tale of an American coach coming to the UK to coach a premier league football club. Behind the relentless optimism there are some life lessons about failure. About going out of comfort zone, trying new things, not understanding the rules or the lingo and listening to people even when they are not necessarily on your side. Most important is how to handle failure.
A People Performance Podcast by T2 on transforming mistakes into valuable learning, explores intelligent failures and the need to place thinking in the diary, to better understand how things go wrong. They offer a 5-stage learning autopsy:
- Collect the data: think about what data you don’t have. Remember to interview and speak to stakeholders.
- Analysis the scene: timeline of events (project plan – contributing factors, people factors, process factors, technology factors and external factors).
- Cause of death: Keep asking why. A root cause analysis is also leadership skill to effectively address problems and create change, described in this blog by Harvard Business School.
- Lessons learned: what did you learn and what are you going to do differently in the future?
- Closure – share the findings and building psychological safety for the future. Document and summarise on a key report. Celebrate not just the wins, but the failures, what has been learned and what will be changed to prevent issues in the future.
Simple failures are preventable and caused by simple reasons. These should be the quick turnarounds and with practice we eventually we spot the issues before they happen and become near misses.
Intelligence failures are the best type as they can be used to test ideas and make improvements. Sometimes this is called ‘Failing Forward’. There is a book, titled Failing Forward, by John C Maxwell exploring the similarities between success and failure and the need to take responsibility for failure and learn from mistakes to try again and improve in the future. A Forbes article written on the topic highlights the risks to team and organisational culture in repeating mistakes, or instilling fear from a blame culture. The author also discusses techniques to develop personal resilience.
We can also consider appreciative inquiry to build on successes, and foster a growth mindset to describe how we are constantly learning from failures. When you say you can’t do something there is power in adding the word ‘yet’ to the end of your sentence.
There is a responsibility of leaders to create a safe space for failure and encourage experimentation. This is critical in this time of rapid development. It isn’t something we do alone it is something you do as a team for shared success and failure. The learning strengthens not just you, but also those around you. It is important to take a coaching approach, even think about a diary to capture what went well, why it succeeded and what changes you would make for the future. It reminds you of successes, how you have adapted, and you can look back and see how much you have developed. It is also critical as librarians that we model this behaviour and practice what we preach.
From personal practice, I know it is difficult to hold yourself to account as well as building trust in others. It feels a vulnerable space to be in standing when you at a conference sharing lessons learned about projects which have failed. There are some tools I reflect on. I like the FailSpace approach, as described by the Centre for Cultural Value, where things are at different levels of failure and understanding what that means. I have also chatted with our Continuous Improvement Team who also reflect that sometimes improvement feels as if it comes from a negative space. We are always looking for problems to solve. Identifying these is the first step in improving for the future and mitigating organisational risk.
I also remember that in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), there are two types of thinker, the “Away From” (motivated by risk) and “Forward to” (motivated by the positive future ahead). As a “forward to” thinker, this helps me reframe conversations for people around me and identify risks.
My final tool is the art of storytelling. As humans we connect to emotion and there is a certain amount of schadenfreude in there, where we want people to fail and then succeed. By doing this, people can relate to the challenge and you inspire people to overcome their own challenges. Matthew Woodget has written an interesting blog about the value of storytelling.
So next time you fail, work as a team to analyse and agree a plan of action. See it as a positive – sometimes it gives permission to stop doing the things that aren’t effective, and think about how this can support and inspire others.
Susan Smith, Knowledge & Library Manager
Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Susan.smith2@mcht.nhs.uk
