Tag: failure

I’ll do it later

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There are three pitfalls of “I’ll do it later”.

The first one in that “later” rarely comes. When we are in the present and we say “I’ll do it later”, we expect a future moment in which we will not only recall that we have that thing to do, but we will also be sufficiently free, awake, willing, energetic to actually do it. As our lives go by, we very rarely get to those moments, various different things getting in the way.

The second one is that as we postpone things, we end up increasing the clutter. Mental and material clutter alike. Keeping things in mind drains energy, and we can only remember a limited amount of things at any given moment. We then use to-do lists, productivity apps, calendars, email inboxes, reminders. And when we defer an item, we end up making it more and more difficult to see and act upon it. It’s what happens when your inbox unread list grows above ten emails.

The third one is that the thing we were supposed to “do later” will certainly pop up in a moment when we can’t do anything about it. Say, when we are already in bed, or while we are driving to work, or when we have just started playing with our kids. And we will feel a little more miserable, and probably end up doubling down on the “I’ll do it later”, resetting to number one of this list.

It turns out, many of the things we push to “later” can actually be done now, without to much of a distraction or effort. And if there are too many of those, than it is probably time to rethink priorities and what is important. Keeping many balls in the air will eventually make you drop all of them.

Your call is (not) important

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My health provider has launched a mobile app a while back. It is pretty handy, as it gives you access to your health history, the booking system, the possibility to consult with a doctor remotely, and other useful stuff.

Today the app failed on me for some reasons, and the error page prompted me to contact customer service to complete what I was doing.

I had to first visit the website from the mobile browser, as the customer service number was nowhere to be found in the mobile app. I called and, after being informed that the call would be recorded for improving the service, I was put in line. Our operators are busy at the moment, if you want you can book an appointment with our app. I realised in the meantime the call was not free. We are still busy, we will answer the phone calls in the order we have received them. Five minutes later, an operator answered and I got the issue sorted in about a minute and a half.

Who pays the price for your faults?

Often, it is the customer. The one you want to serve, the one that already had to endure a disservice and embrace to get on the phone instead of going about their business, the one that can tell others and spread the word.

If your system is designed to ditch responsibility (and costs) when something goes wrong, how do you expect your people to own their failures? How will you get better at doing what you do?

Give me your losers

Fabrizio2 Comments

It is understable to be wanting to learn from winners. To look up to them as if they were demi-god, to try to absorb all of their practices, strategies, tactics, to susped our disbelief when reading of their heroic feats, to become at times obsessed with their words and spread them as if they were ours.

The fact is that we all start from wanting to win.

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. We have to try extra hard to make it safe to fail.

Ed Catmull, interview

We have much more to learn from reflecting on mistakes and failures than we have from tacitly assimilate what others, in different circumstances, have done to succeed.

Let’s look at winners, by all means. And let’s also look at what they did wrong, how they overcame difficult situations, how they woke up and lived the day after. And then, let’s look at those who are stuck there, who have started ten companies with no successful exit, let’s attempt to understand how they cope, what motivates them, and let’s reward them for keep trying.

Winning is the easy bit. I want to hear about losers.

Out of fear

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I was enjoying some of the early Spring (“early” for Finnish standards) with my daugther yesterday, as she was playing on the trampoline. She was jumping amazingly, doing flips I had never seen her doing before. She was gaining confidence, until she miscalculated and slightly hit her head on the rubber surface of the trampoline. Nothing too painful, yet it suddenly made me realize how dangerous what she was doing felt.

She tried to repeat the flips a couple of times, and I was way too scared to let that continue. I only had terrible images of terrible things happening to her in my mind. Eventually, I told her to stop, as it was too dangerous and she could get hurt. After that, she continued jumping more safely and certainly less enjoyably on the trampoline, and I could perceive she had lost part of the confidence that she had so bravely conquered.

The point is, when we are in a position of power, our words and behaviours have an immense impact on the people that look up to us. We can pretend that is not true, that it does not matter, that after all we are just sharing our opinion, and that we are no different from the people we lead. This is a trap I see many flat-organization hands-off managers and leaders do. And still words and behaviours are the major determinant of what we will get from our people.

I am not sharing this to give the impression that overanalyzing or beating ourselves up for our faults is a good option. If we do keep awareness on this power, there are plenty of ways we can correct our mistakes.

“I am sorry I asked you to stop, I was acting out of fear.”
“There is really no reason why you should not apply for that internal position, I am just panicking at the idea to lose such a valid team member.“
“Please, go ahead and do as you were suggesting yesterday. My initial reaction has not been one of the best, and it is because we have never tried that before and honestly I have no idea if that could work or not.“

If we do not maintain awareness, on the other hands, all we get is compliance and bottlenecks that have blossomed out of our own fears and self-doubts.

There is no such thing as a free social media platform

Fabrizio1 Comment

We are hitting our heads against a wall.

For years, we have believed in the myth of “free”. Listening to music was free, watching a video was free, posting your piece of content was free. Whether you were an individual or a company, you could get in front of a fairly wide audience with a very small investment of energy and time, and essentially without spending any money. And of course, as we were getting blinded by the allure of “free”, we forgot about a very important fundamental.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Even when things appear to be free, they are not.

While we have not paid a dime to publish and distribute our content for the past decade or so, we have most likely contributed to the impoverishment of our society and to the extremization of the public discourse.

Furthermore, as marketers we keep banging our heads against the wall every time a platform curbs our potential to reach our audience (current or wanted). We might just understand and accept that those platforms do not exist to allow us to spread our message to whoever we want. And instead we first spend weeks over weeks complaining about how our posts used to get 1000 and now gets 200. Then, we try to game the algorithms, we hack a bit further to try to squeeze more, we ask strangers of dubious reputation to publish or click on links just to try to increase our content’s rank, we use shortcuts to boost metrics that have absolutely no business relevance.

The basics of marketing have been the same for decades, and if we manage to stop our head just for a second, we can see that is what still matters nowadays.

  1. Understand who your audience is.
  2. Ask what they need help with.
  3. Match your product or service to the help needed.

The rest is noise. It distracts us from achieving things that matter and from delivering meaningful change.