Tag: values

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.

 

The theory of empathy

Fabrizio2 Comments

To most people, empathy does not come natural. It certainly does not come natural to me. For many years, I have had the tendency to put myself at the centre of the World. Everything that happened was, to some extent, because of me.

People were certainly acting in a certain way because they wanted to signal something to me. My friend had stopped calling because for sure they did not want to hang out with me any more. My boss was being cranky because she did not like my job and was about to fire me. My girlfriend was being cold because clearly she was not interested in me anymore. And so on.

This slowly built up a worldview according to which it was very difficult for me to be empathic. On one side, the others were mostly being negative. On the other, they were being negative because of me, and so I was also unworthy of their interest, friendship, trust, love.

Raise you hand if this situation sounds familiar.

I had to train myself in empathy. Here is what Wikipedia says about empathy.

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position.

Sounds intimidating just by reading it.

The first step I took was to start asking people about their motives. What I found floored me. In 99.9% of the cases, I was not the reason why they were acting in a certain way. I found, actually, that most people had feelings that I was very familiar with, or were living through situations that I had also lived through in the past.

After I started approaching meditation, and to some extent a more Buddhist take on life, one theme resonated with me. We are all going through the same distress. Even though our lives are different, even if some have more and some have less, even if some are alone and some are not, even if some live in some place and some in another. We are all challenged by the attempt to make sense of a World that is senseless.

When you understand that what you feel, what you think, what you live is an experience you have in common with other human beings, that is the moment empathy unlocks.

I am still learning, and it is easy to fall back to certain patterns, easier than one would care to admit. Real empathy is one of the most needed characteristics in today’s World, and what is incredible about it, is that it expands in a sense of belonging like no other I ever experienced before.

Good luck on your path.

Promises

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We all make promises. Sometimes we say we will do something, other it’s just the mere fact that we are in a certain position that “promises” we will act in certain ways and not in others.

Promises are extremely complicated. Once a promise is made, a pact is established. Nobody likes to be break pacts, yet it is a fact of every day life that most promises are not kept. We forget about them, we do not have time to actually stand by them, we change our mind, we probably did not intend to commit in the first place but thought it was nice or appropriate in the moment.

I found few things to help when it comes to promises and acting on one’s words.

Promise little. Wanting to please people around us is normal, and so we tend to say we will do things even when we already know we don’t have enough time or energy, we don’t really care, we have not the skills to, and so on. Be honest with yourself in the first place, and promise only what you know you can deliver.

Be specific with the promise. Tell what you will do, how, when, with whom, add as many details as you possibly can. This will help you set a plan in your mind that will eventually make it easier to stick to your word. This is particularly helpful also when the promise is done because of the position you are in: if you start in a lead role, it is for example very useful to sit down with the people you will lead and set clear expectations about your role.

Remember and do. This is the tricky bit. Promising little will help you remember, and being specific will help you with doing. Yet eventually, you will still have to follow up on the promise. Doing it is ideal, yet if for any reason you realise you can’t, you will still have to openly and candidly tell something like: “I know I said I would, and for this and that reason it is not possible right now”.

Exceptions and rules

Fabrizio3 Comments

If a customer (or a potential one) shows up with a request that is not in line with your procedures, processes, habits, or even product or service, the generous thing to do is to make an exception.

If that requests gets asked more and more, than you have two options.

Change your procedures, processes, habits, product or service to incorporate the request. You invest time and energy in making a change, as you see that the customers that are asking for it are the ones you want to serve.

Or you say, “thanks, but that’s not what we do.” Not all customers are your customers after all, so it is ok to decide that those asking for that additional feature are not the ones you want to serve.

There’s actually a third option, one you should avoid, the worst one. Not do anything. Keep getting the request, leaving its satisfaction to the moment, juggling about without any clear indication if that’s something that belongs to you or not.

This wastes your time and that of your customers, and time is not something anybody has to spare.

Burning or building

Fabrizio4 Comments

There are two ways to approach failure.

Focus on blame. And then put all your energy in arguing, sentencing, punishing, recovering from the missed opportunity, and eventually (only eventually, with what’s left) rush to some practical action.

Or focus on responsibility. Own it, consult for possible solutions, move on to mitigating actions, and genuinely learn from what has happened.

The first approach burns bridges. It aims at making things clear, crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s, shaming those involved, making sure this will not happen ever again. Even when we do not mean ill, the results are the same. And we are a bit more alone, no matter if the failure was on us.

The second approach builds bridges. It aims at creating a connection, finding ways to work together, building resilience and be ready for the next one. It is incremental, and the more you do it, the more benefit you and the ones around you will get from it.

The same thing is valid for change as well, by the way.