Tag: ed catmull

Protect who you are

FabrizioLeave a comment

Whether we are on the giving or on the receiving part of feedback, we need to make it very clear that there is a distinction between what we do and who we are.

This is liberating. Understanding that what the other person is saying is not a personal critique, as well as approaching the act of providing feedback with the intent of not imposing our worldview on the other, is what makes a relationship stronger and thriving.

So, when we ask for feedback, let’s be specific in what we are seeking. Can you tell me what you think of this thing I wrote? Do you think I should use this or that framework? What would you do to make it better? How do you think I could get better at presenting?

And let it be clear (to us) that what is at stake is not our character, our career, our relationships, our life, our future, our being. Only a minuscule part of that.

When we prepare to give feedback, on the other hand, let’s focus on things that happened and on how we interpreted that or how it made us feel. When that happened, I noticed everyone in the room went silent. This other framework is used more in such cases, because… . I really liked that part of your last e-mail, I find it showed great empathy and consideration. Your presentation featured very interesting information for the company, and with this and that you can make it memorable next time.

If we set a middle ground to have the conversation, without aggressing the other person’s space and building a resistance to our more vulnerable self with awareness and confidence, the magic of candor can truly happen.

Learning beats failure

FabrizioLeave a comment

Of all the buzzwords that permeate today’s business environment, “failure” is perhaps one of the most misunderstood.

“If you are not failing, you are not trying hard enough.”
“There is no success without failure.”
“We allow our people to fail, failure is the most beautiful thing that could happen.”

You’ve probably heard one version of those sentences, and while they all make sense, they put the emphasis on the wrong aspect of the process.

One of the things about failure is that it’s asymmetrical with respect to time. When you look back and see failure, you say, “it made me what I am!” But looking forward, you think, “I don’t know what is going to happen and I don’t want to fail.” The difficulty is that when you’re running an experiment, it’s forward looking.

Ed Catmull

Nobody wants to or can start a project thinking about failure. It goes against how our mind thinks, and it would be the end of the project itself.

A different approach is to shift the focus on the learnings. What about starting a project saying “I want to learn how this works”, or “I want to find out if A is better than B”, or “I’d be happy if by the deadline we would know something important that we do not know today”.

Organisations should leave space to reflect on what is happening (both failures and wins), to share the results of the reflection, and to give others the possibility to absorb relevant learnings from what somebody else has done (again, good or bad).

“If you are not learning, you are not trying hard enough.”
“There is no success without learning.”
“We allow our people to learn, learning is the most beautiful thing that could happen.”

Much better.