On Failure

This week was an anomaly, as I was almost exclusively serving one client. I conducted in total three workshops. A one-day workshop (co-delivered with internal coaches) for the leadership of an entirely new business unit, a 2-hour session for senior executives, and a two-day agile leadership course for the leadership team of another business unit.

In all three sessions we talked about... FAILURE.

This has not been the first time that I have been confronted with questions around this topic... not by this client and not by many others. I actually wrote a piece on failure several weeks ago: Be Proud of LEARNING not of FAILING.

I genuinely believe in this... nobody, and I mean NOBODY (!!!) wants to fail or be called a failure.

We do not want to fail intentionally... what we want is to try new things, because we believe they will work. If we knew we will fail with a certain experiment we would not run that experiment.

Yes, there are experiments, where the chance of success is low which means the chance of 'failure' is high... but we do them because we still believe we might succeed.

Now, my statement is not that there is no such thing as failure. Contrary to what many people say it is not "you either succeed / win or you learn".

There is indeed failure: The failure to learn!

So let's talk about what it takes to learn instead of talking about failure.

Overall learning is not that complicated. We learn mostly in three ways:

1. Learning through study e.g. reading books, listening to podcasts, or watching videos
2. Learning through observation e.g. watching your mentor do something
3. Learning through practice e.g. doing something yourself

Almost everything in life can be learned... there are a few exceptions like the famous NBA scouting quote: "You can't teach height!"

Each of the learning approaches are valid and in most cases people go through them in the order as presented above. In my first career, which was studying medicine and becoming a medical doctor we had all three approaches present.

First, we had to study a subject long and hard. Then, we'd do an internship initially observing how others did something. Finally, we'd practice certain techniques ourselves... sometimes working on dolls first and later (once we'd achieved a certain level of mastery) on humans.

We refer to this approach as: SEE one, DO one, and TEACH one.

We all are students and need to become masters for other people to learn the art and practice of being good medical doctors.

This process of continuous teaching is foundational to the medical profession and it is the reason we have been able to achieve amazing outcomes - best measured by average life expectancy.

In Germany, life expectancy in 1875 was below 39 years. It has increased to above 81 years over the course of 125 years. This is an incredible outcome... mainly driven by a very disciplined approach with regards to learning and setting standards.

This and other phenomenal outcomes over the past decades and centuries are not the result of a culture of failure, but a culture of learning.

So, what is the difference between failure and learning

The key difference is in the discipline of reflection. Many teams and organizations run experiments to learn... but if there is no reflection after one runs an experiment, learning will not occur.

The Deming Cycle also known as PDCA intentionally includes a step for reflection... this is C i.e. CHECK.

As does the Lean Startup method from Eric Ries and Steve Blank . The steps are: Build, Measure, LEARN.

In Scrum we call the reflection events Review (reflecting on WHAT we do) and Retrospective (reflecting on HOW we do things).

Sadly, these are also the events that teams either leave out or fail to do consistently and at a high quality e.g. involving the right people in the case of the Sprint Review.

Yes, we can be as bold as Giannis Antetokounmpo and say: "There is no failure in sports!" (see video at the end of this post). But we can only do that if we have proper reflection in place... which he - given his successes definitely has.

But if we fail to learn through reflection our experiments have been failures... not because of their outcomes, but because we missed the scientific rigour that is required in proper experimentation.

If you are reading this as a leader that genuinely wants to help their teams, one of the best pieces of advice I have for you is to instill a culture of disciplined experimentation in your teams.

And contrary to what many people might believe or say, this culture in itself will be a foundation for psychological safety and courageous decisions. Why? Because people know that wrong decisions will be detected early and that true learning will be the result.

The discipline in reflection will not be a blocker, but maybe the strongest enabler towards a culture of learning.

Have a great weekend and don't forget #FromNothingComesNothing

PS: Here is a clip from Giannis talking about "There is no failure in sports..."