BACK TO THE CLASSROOM

I distinctly remember the day my (simply awesome) science teacher at high school, Richard Hoban, told us about the kinds of events, which we will never forget and which will remain more vivid than others in our memories. He mentioned JFK’s assassination and the day Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon as examples.

I remember as if it were yesterday, how I sat in that classroom in my early teens, super jealous that I had not been around to experience those vivid – burn straight into your memory events like the first moon landing, which in hindsight is kind of ironic if you think about it.

The benefits of hindsight are celebrated in most languages, but as school kids return to their classrooms today in the UK and some parts of Germany, looking back at what we can learn is understandably not at the top of everyone’s to-do list.

We are all delighted to have glimpsed the light at the end of the lockdown tunnel and are understandably heading full steam ahead towards something which surely looks better than what we have today.

I’m confident that working hard and buckling down at school and at work will be enough to make things “normal” again, but just going back to what we had before Covid would mean missing a powerful chance to improve – I mean really make a difference?

 This might feel like a daunting task right now, but I can assure you that things will get better and that the simple solutions to springboard our society to a much better place are coded into what we have just been through – we just need to look for them.

As a man who has built his career around making Progress easier, I have learnt that, as we strive to move forwards, understanding what just happened offers the most useful insights to get ahead.

We can forgive many home-schooling parents and teachers returning to the classroom for welcoming in the new normal after a truly stressful period and taking a well-deserved mental break, but how many of us plan to review what we just learnt after that break? How can we profit in the future from our experiences of balancing home, school and work in our blended lockdown bubbles?

In sport, we recognise the importance of analysing the last match in detail or reviewing our running times and relating them to our change of diet, but we struggle to transfer this approach to other parts of our lives.

We fill our diaries with future plans and reserve so little time for what just happened, and even less for adjusting those future plans accordingly. As if trying harder to do more of the same were the only option available.

We have been brought up in an always look ahead, no regrets, don’t mention yesterday’s problem culture, focussed on creating optimists who get straight back on that horse and try, try, try, try and often fail again. A noble approach in itself, but without the power of reflection, we let coincidence control our destiny – which is often the true source of our mental strain.

This fail fast and forget phenomenon becomes visible during our Win With OKR programme where we guide our clients through their initial OKR cycles. These parts of our OKR Bootcamps never fail to delight the participants, but when we put this approach into practice and start speaking about what went wrong in their own business life, we often meet resistance.

 As if everything other than constant, perfect success is abnormal and that we should be ashamed for not getting things right first time. Many feel uncomfortable talking freely, without judgement about what could have been better and that feeling is stronger the higher we look up the hierarchy tree. We must address this feeling of shame, because leaders who fail to create a safe learning environment will close the door on any innovative ideas in the future – the biggest failure of all. 

Once again, the irony is that many of our clients struggle to find time to prioritise these learning loops. The OKR Grading season activities are mistakenly seen as an add-on, something we might get around to after we have practiced OKR for a few cycles. 

As I explained in my book, OKR helps us to set way more effective targets, but I believe the unsung hero of the Objectives and Key Results framework is that grading process.

We learn how many of the most successful companies of our time have enjoyed exponential success because of and not despite their failures.

Whilst the world looks forward to “returning” to the new normal, we at Progress Factors, are encouraging our clients and we encourage you today to return to that pioneering approach of early 2020 and #getbacktothenewfuture.

So, returning to Richard Hoban’s classroom, I thank him for the way he shaped my life in so many ways and specifically today for the gifts of scientific analysis and reflective learning,

Let’s all take the guesswork out of progress and get back to a better, new future in 2021!