Tag: failure

On getting stuck

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One week ago I got stuck.

I had 98 blog post published, and was about to write number 99. The night before, I had prepared a LinkedIn article to celebrate post number 100. I was quite proud of the result, and I felt on a roll with writing. I started thinking that perhaps I could regularly write longer articles, both on LinkedIn and Medium. Who knows, with a bit of luck I could also publish on some of the local webzines, just to have an additional outlet for the need to share my ideas.

And I got stuck.

It was the first time in more than three months writing every day I felt like I had a completely blank mind. No ideas. I started writing two or three times, on two or three different topics. Some paragraphs, I actually got a post almost complete, and then I realized it was not good enough. I deleted it and started from scratch. The blinking cursor was a terrible countdown.

I breathed. I remembered the reasons why I am doing this. And I took a break. I also told my wife I was stuck, and that helped elaborating the frustration and the dissappointed. After about twenty minutes, I went back to the computer and I wrote blog post number 99.

There are so many elements of resistance in this brief moment of panic. I had set an unimportant target that put pressure on me (the blog post 100 meant I could publish my first article on LinkedIn); suddenly, I had started overworrying about the quality of my posts, and of course I had immediately turned hypercritical (the deleted post would have probably been good enough on a different day); and eventually, my mind shut down completely, refusing to produce any idea to put into words.

These type of moments happen all the time you have to use consistently your brain to achieve something that matters. Be aware and kind to yourselves, and remember that more often than not, taking a deep breath and a break will get you unstuck.

Time

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Time is limited and it is one of the most critical resources.

Contrary to money, that can be spent on multiple different things (when you have it), time is a trade-off matter. And for this reason, how it is invested is extremely important.

I do not have time to develop my team members. I am overworked and overwhelmed, there’s absolutely no chance I can dedicate time to that.

This is a perfectly possible and understable scenario. In the short-term, there might be more important things than a meaningful conversation, a career development discussion, a training to organise or a coaching session.

Or might they?

Consider the following:

  • Do you have time to answer all the questions?
  • Do you have time to take all the decisions?

If your people is not empowered and developed, most likely they will continue to come to you every time they have a doubt, a concern, a request. Every time there is a decision to make, important or not.

Of course, this is the best case scenario. The alternative would be that they’d simply ignore their questions and the needs for new decisions, and carry on with whatever it is that they are doing. Good or bad. Until they’ll leave, that will be rather sooner than later. And then:

  • Do you have time to keep hiring continuosly?

An apparently intelligible decision (I am now focusing on everything but developing my team) can lead to a counter-intuitive consequence (I only have time to answer to my team’s short-term needs).

What we spend time on, not only determines our priorities today, but will also determine our priorities tomorrow. To take control of both, it is worth spending some more time figuring out how our decisions are going to play out in the long-term. This is something worth making some space in your calendar for.

What marketing is not

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The inability to listen. The idea that by interrupting and telling your story people will be amazed. The practice of segmenting into hundreds of small niches to feed them whatever they want today. The ideas of optimization, hacking, ranking, fans and followers. The belief that data is better than interactions. The effort to second-guess needs and wants to stay clear of the risk of asking. The easy shortcut of personalised and automated user journey. The unrelentless focus on growth.

Marketing is not ruining the world. The things above are. And at the same time they set expectations, both for marketers and customers, that cannot be met, leading to inevitable dissatisfaction.

Key insights and themes from the research include:

  • Data is a dilemma. But “big data” isn’t marketing’s biggest challenge. It is actually the “small data” – the data used to describe the small, specific attributes delivered directly from the customer through, as an example, the Internet of Things. 36 percent of respondents believe that small data will be the greatest challenge for the organization.
  • We’ve lost the ability to be human, and we can’t blame the machines. Some 41 percent admit that they are overly focused on driving campaigns, forgetting that they are building relationships. Nearly 30 percent admit they think of their customers in terms of targets, records and opportunities – interestingly an equal amount admit that they are also struggling to define and deliver returns from customer experience strategies.
  • Going small could bring our humanity back. Marketers believe small data will help extract better signal from the noise (45 percent), reveal the “why” behind customer actions and behaviors (41 percent), help focus on the people behind the data to deliver more human interactions (35 percent) and aid in filling key gaps across the customer journey (35 percent.)

CMO Council Research

 

When does feedback matter?

Fabrizio1 Comment

Feedback is important, and as I wrote before the only thing to say when we get it is “thank you”.

Yet, we should not fall into the trap of taking action on every piece of feedback we get. Feedback is about the person who is giving it much more than it is about the person who is getting it. If I tell somebody “you should be more productive”, that simply means that the person does not fit into my idea of productivity. If somebody tells me “you should listen more”, that simply means that from where they stand, they are under the impression I am not listening enough.

Consider three things when you get feedback.

Who is giving it? Is that a person you care about, somebody important in your life? Is that your customer, or somebody your work is not intended for? Is that a friend, a family-member, somebody who knows you intimately?

What channel is it coming from? Did they bother picking up the phone, sharing their thoughts face-to-face, at least letting you know who they are? Or is it an anonymous feedback, something you are reading on social media, the starred opinion of a faceless and nameless reader?

What are they saying? Is it something you are hearing for the first time, or something somebody else has already noticed about you in the past? Is it a piece of advice you can act on, or just an opinion, a feeling, a thought? Are they sharing kindly, from the bottom of their heart, or are they being mean, malicious, trying to elicit any kind of reaction?

Once you have considered all this, of course still say “thank you”. And take action only if it makes sense. Otherwise, move on and continue delivering your best work.

Learning beats failure

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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.