Employing Differences

Employing Differences, Episode 23: What if there's no such thing as failure?

October 20, 2020 Karen Gimnig & Paul Tevis
Employing Differences
Employing Differences, Episode 23: What if there's no such thing as failure?
Show Notes Transcript

"Failure is such a juicy topic and such an emotionally loaded word. I think what's interesting is that in a lot of the work that we do, we talk about wanting to be in a space where it's safe to fail, where we can learn from failure. I think in working with groups around that, we struggle sometimes working through people's relationship to the concept of failure. So we wanted to spend some time exploring what that is and what that really means and how it shows up."

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Paul:

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen:

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul:

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen:

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is"What if there's no such thing as failure?"

Paul:

Failure is such a juicy topic, I think– such an emotionally loaded word. I think what's interesting is that in a lot of the work that we do, we talk about wanting to be in a space where it's safe to fail, where we can learn from failure. I think in working with groups around that, we struggle sometimes working through people's relationship to the concept of failure. So we wanted to spend some time exploring what that is and what that really means and how it shows up.

Karen:

Yeah, I think it starts really young. I mean, when you just think about the grades are not A- B-C-D-E. We skip the E so we can get to the great big fat F for failure, right from the beginning. So almost as soon as we can talk, we have this incredible shaming, hurtful, negative implication around the word failure, the concept of failure. That failure is a bad, bad thing you want to avoid at all costs is written into our earliest sort of development of going out into the world.

Paul:

And there's a real cost to that because what happens when we get hooked by failure, which is really just that our expectations around something weren't met– I think we'll come back to that– but when we get hooked by it, we can fall into a pretty deep cycle. We can really let our emotional reaction overpower what is from an objective viewpoint actually happening. I think it's important to kind of take back some power from that. I used to do a lot of improv theater and in improv, we talk sometimes about the notion of the failure bow. This comes from the idea that there are no mistakes in improv, right? There are only happy accidents. And the idea that there are no mistakes in jazz. And if you're not making mistakes, you're making a mistake. I forget which of seven different jazz musicians I've heard that attributed to. But the failure bow is the notion that when you do something, which you might regard as a failure, where things didn't go the way you were expecting, or the way that you were hoping– you announce that and you own it, and you say,"I have failed!" and you take the big failure bow. The reason why that can be valuable to do from a personal standpoint is it's not letting that hang over you anymore. You're owning it rather than it owning you. You're acknowledging that that wasn't what you intended to have happen. And then you're able to sort of– and you're pointing it out to the group too. You're like,"Hey, I want to acknowledge that's not what I hoped was going to happen." And now we can move forward with it rather than just sort of being caught in that emotional vortex that I think often assigns that big F of failure.

Karen:

Yeah. I think that's really important. And I think there are a lot of ways to go about it so we can play with the word failure and shift sort of what it means within our context. We can stop using that word failure. We can contemplate sort of what our expectations are. I mean, I think one of the really interesting things about this is that I think what counts as failure is exactly, as you said, it's based on our expectations and it is a construct. I mean, it's part of our culture, but it's not a reality of the universe. I mean, it's not like the color of the sky or a law of physics. It is a construct that we have within our culture that we say,"We predict, this is the thing that should happen, that's desirable to happen, that we're trying to make happen." And having identified that then if that doesn't materialize in the way that we envisioned, we name that failure. And I think what we're pointing out is that that's something we choose to do, and we can choose to do something else. And we can choose to be in a space where both, we don't talk about failure in the same way that we, that we try and de-shame it. We try to sort of strip away the negative emotions so that the learning potential that exists when something unexpected happens,– we don't really learn very much when things go the way we thought they would. For better or worse, when something goes differently than we thought it would, that's our learning space. And if it's, if it goes differently in a way that's pleasurable, then we look at that and go,"Oh, how can we do more of that? What did we do differently to make that happen?" When something goes in a way that we think is not pleasurable, or that is painful in some way, we call that failure. And, and there's all sorts of reasons not to do that for one thing. I think it's almost just not even honest, cause almost always, it's not a direct,"This happened, therefore that." There's almost always this complexity about it. But mostly because it's not useful. All of the shame and baggage that comes with failure isn't useful. And yet we continue to construct it for ourselves.

Paul:

When we talk about the idea of"What if there's no such thing as failure?" I think it is important to acknowledge that that's not to say that there aren't consequences. When we talk about it being safe to fail, when we're going to do something, what we really mean is that the consequences of our expectations not being met are not so dire that we're horribly concerned about it. When we're talking about that innovation space and the ideas of working in complexity and creating an environment where it's safe to fail, what we're really talking about is looking at the consequences of unmet expectations and saying these are okay. Absolutely we predict, we expect something will happen. There's an important piece in Toyota Kata, the idea of we want to run some experiments to figure out what's going to happen here, where at the very beginning we write down what we expect will happen. Then we run the experiment and then we write down what actually happened. And comparing the two is where the learning happens. To what you said, if we regard not meeting that initial expectation as a failure, then we play all kinds of games that actually prevent us from being able to learn. And so I think we aren't going to run those kinds of experiments if our expectations not being met– if the consequence of that is so dire that our organization won't survive, the group won't survive, you know, those sorts of things. We have to be careful about how we scope those things. I think that's often what we mean when we say like,"Failure is not an option." What we actually mean is we really don't like the consequences of this thing not happening. I think it's important to separate those things out: the idea of what the consequences might be versus what our expectations are and what the sort of emotional consequence of those not being met are.

Karen:

And I think there are some times dire consequences. And so we're where I sort of look at with this is the distinction between the sort of external largely out of our control realities that may or may not be a direct consequence of what we did. If we don't get the bid for that thing, or the experiment didn't work, the program didn't run the way we thought it would, whatever that thing is, those things are gonna happen, but we don't have a choice. We can't do a lot about that. But what is happening internally, both like within oneself and especially what's happening within a team around that we have a great deal of control over. And so a lot of, I think the safe to fail kind of concept or what we're saying about"What if there's no such thing as failure?" What if we aren't going to point to anybody and say"You failed"? What if we live in a space where that's just not the place we go energetically. And I think the reason that matters– in terms of paying attention to where failure does or doesn't exist or where we do or do not choose to bring it into our relationships and our teamwork and our self concept around work, all of those places– is that if we live in a failure story, whether the actual failure or the potential for failure, if we live in that language of failure, we inevitably are going to push against it. We're going to push for the thing and try and drive the thing and we're going to be in a reactive space out of fear. And more often than not, that predicts failure, like that pushes us to. Because we're distracted from the really good teamwork flow. We're distracted from the innovation and the creativity because we're protecting ourselves, we're guarding against this horrible thing that's out there. And so if we just choose that relationally there's no such thing. Relationally energetically between us. We have positive experiences. We have negative experiences, but solidly as a team, we have belonging and we are all here and we learned some stuff and there's a next thing that happens that it actually will predict the consequences and outcomes far more reliably to be in the direction that we want, because that's where our energy is.

Paul:

Yeah. Well, I think that's going to do it for us for today. So until next time, I'm Paul Tevis

Karen:

And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.