OF COURSE NOT! Sorry to disappoint you — somehow even stating the obvious on social media sounds prophetic. ;-) It is in fact quite curious how some people have turned a failure fad into a failure fetish.
- Does that mean we should all become relentless perfectionists? Certainly not! “Perfect” has indeed a tendency to become the “enemy of good” and we must learn to “satisfice”, carefully choosing our battles.
- Does it mean we should always beat ourselves (and others up) when we fail to do what we promise? Not even. Compassion, humility and forgiveness are important virtues, recognizing our own fallibility and encouraging fearless, playful experimentation.
But all of that does not really justify a curious propagation of “fuck-up Fridays”, or other mindless endorsements of mistakes, every time something goes wrong. (Sorry, party people! ;-)) As Amy Edmondson points out in her recent work: certain failures are the “RIGHT” kind of fuck-ups, the “right kind of wrongs” so to speak, and should be recognised — whereas others are not. Good failures, Amy suggests, are those that are:
- a) venturing into new territory, not routine jobs;
- b) opportunity-driven, ie where the gamble is worth the risk we take;
- c) informed by appropriate knowledge, ie clearly framed by ‘a priori’ hypotheses, not just shots into the dark;
- d) “as small as possible” — it makes no sense to celebrate that we blew up the lab if we could have gained the same insight with a small test tube experiment!
In addition, Amy suggests a “bonus” condition: it would be great if we really learned something from our mistakes. Arguably, my priorities are somewhat different from Amy’s — who I suspect was thinking about civilised academic research, rather than the messiness of corporate #transformation. In organisational change, it is not really a nice-to-have to continuously increase actionable insights. The whole point of any “reasoned” failure is (organisational) LEARNING.
But, then, what are the most important insights we should strive for? When it comes to organisational evolution, I believe Alfred Adler was right when he once pointed out: “all our big problems are RELATIONSHIP problems.” In my experience, the most critical leadership insights result from relational creativity, conflict or crisis. Indeed, it is curious that so much has been written about developmental stages in psychology — they come in endless variations and colours, attractive names and sophisticated definitions — but so very little about the all-important “transitions” in between!
Maybe, then, when we open that next bottle of champagne on a Failure Friday, we should focus less on our mistakes (or successes) in the execution of projects, product launches or advertising campaigns. Rather, we might want to celebrate that never-routine and sometimes terribly difficult collaboration with others — especially when we have learned something that nurtures a more solid understanding of ourselves, or sparks healthier dynamics in our teams — in other words, when individually or collectively we generate “post-traumatic growth” and truly become better, heading towards our next stage of development.
But in reality, that of course has nothing to do with Amy’s sophisticated instructions about how to get the most from failure. It is so much not about WHAT we do, but about WHO we are. It is about cherishing our profoundly human capacity to rise beyond our egos, to turn mundane moments of togetherness into timeless memories of joy and growth, and to elevate each other to become our best, with and for each other. In this sense, a big cheers to all-week-long endeavours not only to accept our human shortcomings with more humility, but also to embrace and eulogize our wonderful ability to re-enchant our life at work for good!
#transformation #goodorganisations #leadership #organisationalchange #agility #teal #membership
