Change your perspectives on failure, then find safe-to-fail experiments together, introduce failure sharing moments and discuss how to create the safe space that you need in order to make failing safe for everyone on the team.
Duration: Short exercise
A short exercise takes 30 minutes or less. They typically address one specific element of a topic. You can use them in your meeting, at the start of your day with your team. We have written them to be fun, easy interventions.
When to use this tool?
Maybe you are perfectionists? Or your team has a lot of discussions after something went wrong. Or stuff goes wrong repetitively and nobody dares to discuss it. Or maybe you just lose out on energy as a team because it feels like you fight an uphill battle and you just don’t get it right.
Then in this excise, you recognize that many successes come through failing and learning first. If it isn’t good enough yet, it might just mean there is an opportunity to improve and it is up to you to figure out how to make it happen.
If you agree on what “good failure” is you can use it as a team to learn and improve!
How does it work?
Working with failure takes some time. Here are our 5 steps you can follow to set up a good failure environment. But let’s start with a quote: “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm” by Winston Churchill
What do you need to get started?
For the list, you could use a flipchart or open a document on your laptop.
Step 1. Create a “we benefit from failure” mindset.
Have a short conversation with your team about the importance of failure to achieve success. You can do this in two ways:
1) You can search for inspiring stories or quotes that relate to your work in order to explain the importance of failure.
2) If you’d like to draw from your own past, ask the team the following question to get the conversation started: Where and how did you learn the most recently? And was the “something went wrong / not as planned / could go better” part of it?
Step 2. Agree on safe-to-fail experiments.
You don’t want every failure to happen. There are some failures that are not needed and some failures that cause too much harm for it to be ok to fail. Create a list together of things you can do that are “safe-to-fail” and another one with “not-safe-to-fail” items. Because only with the “safe-to-fail” you can experiment.
Decide on what the components are that have to be in place for these kinds of experiments. You can agree to take one or more of them on and test this new mindset with it.
Step 3. Introduce failure sharing moments.
In order to learn from failure, there needs to be a space for it. Decide where and how you’d like to share your failures. You can add it as an agenda item to your meetings, you can introduce a monthly “failure celebration lunch”. Make it a recurring thing to do together to make sure the space is there without somebody needing to ask for it.
This step is important because you don’t want a big hurdle to start talking about your failures. Let’s recognize that for most of us it isn’t a topic we would jump straight into, it might just make us feel awkward. So you want to make it effortless to talk about it.
Step 4. Agree on how to create a safe space to share.
It’s a very vulnerable act to share your failures as in most companies making failures this public could lead to many downsides. That’s why it’s important to make sure that no one faces unfair consequences. It’s helpful to focus on the learning that is hidden in failures rather than what went wrong. Create a few rules or principles that help everyone sharing about their failure still feel appreciated and valued.
Some examples of team norms that create a safe culture are:
a) Listen before you react.
b) Ask questions before you have an opinion.
c) Data is more important than opinions.
d) There always is a chance to correct an error before it’s a mistake.
e) Never blame, focus on the improvement option.
In our “Team norms” tool in the Teambooster App, you’ll find some more examples and how to do this.
Step 5. Capture all your agreements, meetings and actions.
Once you’re done with setting up experiments and circumstances that are safe-to-fail capture your results on the how we work board, add the meetings to your calendar and capture the experiments on your task list.
Have fun running these experiments!
