Fail, Fail, Fail Again
Why one of the best things we can do as leaders is talk about our screw ups
Last week, I inhaled a brilliant book by organisational psychologist Amy Edmonson called Right Kind of Wrong: How the Best Team Use Failure to Succeed. I was already an Edmonson fan; her book The Fearless Organization, about how creating psychological safety within a workplace is essential for teams and companies to achieve their potential, had a big influence on how I thought about leadership. This book was equally thought-provoking and, if anything, slightly more confronting as regards to my own approach to mucking things up.
One of the stories in the book demonstrates how we are hard-wired to shy away from failure - a parent, in the car with their young child, is involved in a very minor prang and the child immediately says “It wasn’t my fault!” This is something I’ve seen in my own kids - an incredibly strong drive to ensure that we know they’re not to blame (even when, sometimes, they are). And if I look back across my life and career, I can think of many times when I have failed - everything from things that are definitive failures (such as a music exam that I didn’t pass as a teenager) to interactions that I now cringe at, projects that weren’t as good as they could have been and the many many interviews which didn’t lead to me being offered a job at the end. These failures aren’t nice to think about - some of them make me almost physically squirm - and, as a consequence, it’s easy to pop them into a small mental filing cabinet marked ‘things I’ll never think about again’. When I failed the clarinet exam as a teenager, I did an almost literal version of this - the results arrived in the post, I took one look at them and then shoved them in a drawer under my bed and didn’t tell anybody for two weeks.
Unsurprisingly, Edmonson’s book posits the thesis that, shockingly, this is not a productive way to behave. Failure is the cornerstone of how we learn and how we grow - one chapter begins with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt: “The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.” Annoyingly, though, in order to embrace this philosophy, we have to override millions of years of evolution. Edmonson describes how humans have some innate “prepared fears” such as dangerous animals, loud noises, sudden movements - and being expelled from the tribe. In days of yore, being forced to roam the tundra solo could easily be fatal, so much of our behaviour around other humans is shaped by a desire not to be cast out. As a consequence, we shy away from the discomfort of screwing up, either by not putting ourselves out there at all or by not fully analysing failure when it happens, rendering us unable to learn from it and, ironically, more likely to miss the warning signs and do it again in the future.
Edmonson outlines some great frameworks in the book that we can use to shift our own approach to failure; she also cites a couple of studies that I think give an interesting perspective on how leaders can support their whole team to embrace a failure-positive attitude. In the first, participants were asked to take a test and were either given feedback that was framed positively (‘you are correct’) or negatively (‘you are incorrect’). They were then asked to take a similar test, one where they could apply the knowledge from their first attempt in order to do well. The people that had received the feedback framed in a positive way did better on this second test than those who’d received it in the negative - essentially, those who felt that they’d got things wrong proved less able to learn from this than those who were, presumably, feeling good about getting things right. However, in another variant of the experiment, participants were asked to watch someone else take the test and receive either positive or negative feedback, before then taking the test themselves and guess what? There was no difference between the positive and negative framings. Learning from other people’s failures seems to be much more possible than learning from our own.
For leaders who are anything like me this is excellent news, because, as described above, I have failed many, many times and would be delighted for said failures to be put to good use. What the study above tells me is that there is real benefit from talking about things that have gone wrong for you, whether that be in a previous role or situation, or something that’s happened recently that you’re happy to share with the team. This not only forces you to confront and analyse these failures, but also gives others the opportunity to learn from them and, hopefully, apply what’s been discovered in the future.
The second study that caught my eye is an exercise that Edmonson gives her students called the Electric Maze, which is in essence a non-sadistic version of that Squid Game challenge where the players have to try and find the parts of a glass bridge that are safe to tread on with the prospect of plunging to their deaths if they failed (an experiment which, I think you’ll agree, would not pass university ethics approval). In Edmonson’s lower-stakes version, the students have a grid on the floor and each square will either emit a beeping noise or stay quiet when they step on it - their job is to find a way to the other side without setting off the beeper. Despite this being a relatively straightforward task, the students frequently got paralysed by indecision as they didn’t want to make a mistake and set off a buzzer, and therefore didn’t manage to complete the task within the twenty minutes allocated.
Edmonson then adds another element into the mix - a lab assistant, pretending to be a student, joins the team and either approaches the task with an “execution orientation (emphasising the importance of being right and avoiding mistakes) or a learning orientation (emphasising the importance of experimenting and learning)”. Those with an undercover lab assistant taking the latter approach ended up doing considerably better in the task.
What this says to me is that, as leaders, we can help set the tone for our teams by adopting a learning orientation in our work. In the arts sector, we are experimenting with new things all the time - new shows, new artists, new platforms, new marketing techniques - and it’s inevitable that some of these things won’t work out as well as they could. Rather than taking the easy option of chalking it up to experience and never thinking about it again, by celebrating the fact that we tried something new and embracing failure as an essential part of our creative work, we can support ourselves and others to scale ever greater artistic heights in the future.