Re:placing Organizations - Dealing With Failure

We all make mistakes.

Why is it so hard for us to address them in organizations?

A conversation thread on LinkedIn responding to a post by Adam Grant , is the inspiration for this second issue of Re:placing Organizations.

Grant makes the useful point that organizations have to be safe places for mistakes to be discussed. Attacking people for making mistakes does not reduce the incidence of mistakes, it reduces the incidence of reported mistakes.

In and of itself none of this is remarkable for anyone working in the space of human organizations. Everyone from W. E. Deming to Taiichi Ono to Amy Edmondson, and many before and after have outlined the relationship between psychological safety, organizational/operational transparency, and the embrace of failures as doorways to improvement.

But then someone shared a question in the comment thread, that took the conversation deeper:

But what if one cannot even draw attention to an error without being accused of "blaming and shaming"??Everybody makes mistakes. It's a universally known quip that we all learned in elementary school.

It Gets Personal

There is an important truth about managing or leading organizations: It is always personal in the end. All the theory, all the models, collapse into a moment of intimate humanity. Skin touches skin. A human being with all of their unmappable joyful/painful complexity interacts - unmediated by any theory - with another biological mass of complexity.

So the answer to the question posed in the thread will always be at best vague and at worst completely miss the mark because none of us were in that conversation, breathing through that passing moment of complexity and gritty feelings. We did not hear the tone of voice, see the language of the bodies, the history and the context for the conversation, what the two people mean to each other, or anything else that really matters.

Responses

It is true that no one but the people in the room and in the conversation can know what 'really' happened. But there are some things to consider or practice if we seek to become effective colleagues, managers, or leaders in the practice of talking about failures and about mistakes.

Hit pause. A brief moment to reflect on how one wants to approach the conversation, or a longer procedural pause to seek answers to the question "Why?" is the non-negotiable first step. We require a moment of turning away, backing away, 'dollying back', allowing time for new information, a new space or frame to emerge.

I tell my clients and my students that I believe The Pause is the most powerful relationship/leadership/organizational management tool we have. Intentionally insert a beat; a space for consideration and exploration. Silence. Allow the time for shifting, especially the time for shifting from a reactive limbic state to a constructive cognitive and empathetic state of curiosity.

Enter humility. You may be wrong. You don't have all the facts. No one ever has all the facts. Before deciding why a mistake or failure happened or what caused it, pause - exhale - and step intentionally - inhale - into humility. You are here to serve and you are here to work with as close to the facts as you can get. If you can't accept that, any response you are about to make risks contributing to the problem, including making the other person feel attacked.

It is when the pause is not taken and humility is not stepped into that the accusations of "blaming and shaming" are very likely to arise.

Take accountability. As a leader or manager, radical accountability is the step beyond humility. This level of accountability asks you to dive under the surface of the situation and ask, "What is my contribution to this situation? What of this am I accountable for?" If the answer that comes up, especially if it comes up with force and speed, is "Nothing!" return to your pause and find that place of humility.

As a leader or manager there is always some way in which we can take accountability for a situation we find our team in. At a minimum, even if we did not play an immediate role in the situation, we have been a part of shaping the system in which the mistake or failure occurred. That system always always has a role to play, and as leaders and managers we are accountable for that system.

The step of actively taking accountability is crucial, because without it the other person is left pinned by the entire weight of the failure or mistake. It will be extremely difficult for this person not to feel blamed and shamed after they have been isolated in this way.

Start collaborating. If you can find that place of accountability, it opens the space for collaboration. It shifts the conversation from me vs. you to us vs. the problem. It further creates the possibility of shifting from an emotional experience of failure, to one of opportunity. This is the spirit of Continuous Improvement (Kaizen in the Toyota Production System). In my work we talk about OFIs - Opportunities for Improvement. When we shift to shared accountability we set the stage to shift to collaboration in improvement.

I see this step very physically, in the arrangement of our bodies. It starts with me con-fronting you. It shifts to me walking around the table to be be-side - on the same side - with you. Now we are both looking at the failure. It is not yours; it is ours.

Re:placing Shapes - A new arrangement

That arrangement just described, of you and I standing, sitting, working, beside each other in that moment is both a human relationship and an organizational 'shape'.

This matters because it informs our work to replace our thinking of the 'real' nature of organizations the metaphorical shapes often described as 'hierarchical' or 'flat'.

In our journey here, I'm going to suggest those terms may no longer be useful. They are not meaningful because they are too abstract. They are not meaningful because they don't address the actual arrangement of humans creating value or solving problems.

A hierarchy is a description of an arrangement of containers. It describes cells within organs within bodies. It describes rocks on a planet in a solar system in a universe. It describes team members on a team in an organization.

The 'height' or 'pointy-ness' of an organization (AKA hierarchy) is not really a function of its shape, though that is almost universally the way it is thought of. Those things are actually a description of the speed and quality of communication, and the existence of people with power over other people.

So when it comes to interacting with each other in the experience of a failure, those abstract shapes are irrelevant and frankly, distractions.

We'll dive into this more deeply in a future newsletter, but when it comes to the 'design' of the organization, and its relationship with processing/integrating failure, only three things matter:

1. Is our arrangement such that information about the failure travels quickly and without distortion?
2. Is our arrangement such that 1-up/1-down power over dynamics are increasingly made irrelevant as the real dynamics are the ones that create value and solve problems. Who is the boss of whom on an org chart is an irrelevant abstraction.
3. Is the arrangement fluid, responsive, and generative of connection, containing, and supporting?

Look at your team, and at the organization, and ask yourself: are we arranged in the best way possible for information flow, problem solving, and human connection?

Thank you for reading.

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Clemens Rettich