The principle that we learn from failure makes sense. Understanding why something hasn’t worked prevents us (hopefully) from making the same mistakes again and helps us to adapt and progress. However in practice it’s really hard to admit that we failed. We don’t like it. It’s emotional. It can feel painful.
We have opportunities to achieve great success if we can create environments or ways of working that allow us to test ideas, learn from failure, adapt quickly, test again and keep learning.
There is a renowned story about the charity Greenpeace and their ‘Dog’s Bollocks Award’ ceremony, where staff shared their failures. By encouraging staff to spotlight what didn’t work, Greenpeace achieved two key things:
- Helping staff from around the world learn from each others’ mistakes
- Demonstrating to staff that a certain level of risk and failure is acceptable, as long as the lessons are publicly acknowledged and not swept under the carpet
Get deliberate about sharing failure
A team I worked with implemented a ‘fail yea!’ slot on their monthly meeting. It deliberately forces people to consider and share what didn’t work so well, in order to help each other develop better solutions for next time. Pitched as a positive, ‘fail yea!’ has helped them develop their work, particularly around their events programme which has improved significantly because they were honest, challenged themselves on areas for improvement and were supportive to sharing and learning as a team.
The word failure can in itself be triggering for some people, another team I work with has a ‘what did we learn this month’ section on their team meetings. It’s a different, less emotional way to frame failure yet still helps to make that cultural shift of sharing what hasn’t worked and celebrating the learning along with the successes.
Make it safe to share failure
Creating a safe environment where people can share and learn from failure is not easy, but it will lead to better results and help to prevent failures from being replicated. Here are five practical things that you can do to get started.
- Acknowledge that failure is emotional and a shift in mindset is required to even begin to address failure.
- Lead by example and start to share your own failures. Focus on what you have learned and what you will do differently next time.
- Ask your team and colleagues for their ideas about ways to make sharing failure and learning part of everyone’s day-to-day work.
- Consider a structured way to feedback and record failures, it might be a slot on a team meeting, or a part of a project group debrief, it could be awards or an online learning space to share failure. However you do it the focus is on the learning not the failure.
- Start right now and if it doesn’t work then adapt and try again – see point 2.
I run workshops and training helping teams to create environments where it’s safe to fail and learn. If you’d like to chat about a workshop for your team then get in touch or book a time to chat.