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It’s OK to Fail!Creating a Safe Space to Learn from Failure

Ewan O’LearyAgile Coach

Who Am I?

‘I don’t have all of the answers, but I know some of the questions to ask’

Why Are We Here?

#Fail

Pithy Quotes

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. – Winston Churchill

Success is going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill (Yeah, he failed. A lot.)

Everybody want safety (safety love) –Alex Ebert, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, Man on Fire

What Failure Means (Mostly)

Silent mind map exercise

1. Get into teams of 3-5

2. Put the word ‘Failure’ in the middle of your flipchart

3. Write down everything that comes to mind on the topic as you free associate with your team

4. Take 5 minutes to map your input IN SILENCE

5. Once we’re done, we’ll walk the walls for 5 minutes, and do a read out.

6. The objective of this exercise is to desensitize you and your teams to the idea or concept of failure.

Effective vs Ineffective Failure

Ineffective Effective Failure

Reduces team motivation Increases team motivation

Reduces courage Reinforces courage

Reduces sharing of commitments Increases sharing of commitments

Weakens team identity Strengthens team identity

Increases apathy Decreases apathy

Reduces trust Increases trust

Dysfunctional behavior becomes more damaging

Dysfunctional behavior increaseslearning

Invites management control Promotes self-organization

Growth Mindset

© Carol Dweck

A Spectrum of Failure

InattentionLack of Ability

Process and Inadequacy

Task Challenge

Process Complexity

UncertaintyHypothesis

TestingExploratory

Testing

After © Amy C. Edmondson, HBR, April 2011

The team inadvertently deviates from accepted behaviors because they’re not paying attention

The team doesn’t have the skills, conditions or training to execute effectively (impediments are not condiments!)

The team adheres to the process, but it doesn’t work effectively (um, scrum anyone?)

The team faces a task too difficult to be executed reliably every time (oh, you mean like actual software development?)

The process is too complex and causes breakdowns

A lack of clarity about future events causes people to take reasonable actions that produce undesired results.

An experiment conducted to prove that an idea or a design will succeed fails

An experiment conducted to expand knowledge and investigate a possibility leads to an undesired result (awesome!)

Blameworthy Praiseworthy

Some Powerful Questions

What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

What if we fail – how will we recover?

What is the worst that could happen?

What if we do nothing?What is truly

worth doing, whether we fail or succeed?

In this failure, what went right?

Working Agreement

1. Use Spectrum of Failure to establish a working agreement on how failures of different kinds will be handled

2. Invitation to conversation on a tough subject for many organizations – be compassionate and gentle!

3. Use the powerful question examples to help your stakeholders deepen their understanding of the possibilities

4. Move to the understanding that failure is not a dysfunction of the system and doesn’t need to be fixed. Rather, it’s a feedback mechanism that allows the system to get to know itself, and how it delivers value.

Last Suggestion: Horse’s Rear Award

1. Claimed by the individual, claim acknowledged by the group, publically in a celebration, perhaps at the end of the sprint

2. The award circulates frequently – horses don’t keep still…

3. Avoid keeping track – desensitize the experience and focus on learning.

4. Turnover of the award might tell you something about taking risks in your organization, or it might not!

Follow Up Discussion