Practicing the Weekly Embrace of Failure

I love the story of the Dun and Bradstreet failure wall. Read it and try to tell me it doesn’t stick in your head: the image of this huge wall covered with scribbled admissions of failure in Sharpie.

It flips the whole idea of failure upside-down and acknowledges the humanity of it. Everyone from Bill Gates to the summer intern fails. The more important question is: so what?

With my first company (a story for another post), we held a weekly meeting called “Elephants in the Room”. It was a public airing of failures and lessons-learned. After I started Growth Spark, the idea stuck around. Our version today is called “Weekly Reflections”. Once a week, we get together (some of us in-person and some via video call) to talk about our client relationships, project challenges, tough situations, and successes.

It’s a visible way that we create a culture of growth by accepting our mistakes and failures, sharing them as a team, and learning from them together.

For me as a leader, it’s also an opportunity to get insight into the team sentiment. Morale. Friction. And it’s an environment where people can voice their concerns, feel like they’re heard, and contribute to the growth of the company.

Here’s how it works:

Start with a Question: Each week, I choose a question to get the conversation started. I’ve asked, “What’s one thing you wish you didn’t have to do as part of your job?” and “Is there a better way to celebrate our successes?” and “What’s one this you do to relax after work?”. Some weeks, the questions are more mundane (“How was your week?”, “Have you learned anything this week?”, “What are your hardships right now?”) but the goal is always to get someone talking.

Who’s Next? Who ever speaks chooses the next person to go. Whoever goes last this week is the first to speak next week.

Respect everyone’s contributions. Some people are more introspective and find it easier to contribute in this setting. Others need to hear someone else’s thoughts to be prompted to chime in. Everyone has quiet days from time to time, and sometimes people need to vent. There’s some moderation needed to keep things focused and moving.

Write it down. Extract the “issues”. I write down every lesson learned. Then we hone in on concrete issues - the meaningful problems that need to be addressed. For example, maybe our quality assurance process isn’t catching enough bugs. We write down what action needs to happen to fix it, and who is responsible for getting it done.

So many initiatives have come out of these meetings. It may not be the same as Jeff Stibel’s handwritten failure wall (that probably wouldn’t go over well with our co-working space), but it’s it’s one of the most successful ways that we keep improving and growing as an agency and as individuals.

How does your business celebrate and learn from failure? Tell me in the comments!