Learning from failure

I was reflecting with my father a few months ago on how the reluctance of leadership teams to learn from failure is one of the things that can lead to catastrophic failure and toxic cultures forming within organisations.

In his long career in both private and public sector organisations he had several times seen this failure to learn from failure creating repeating patterns of organisational ineffectiveness and significant wasted effort. Yet learning from failure and seeing value in these experiences are like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which roughly translates to “golden joinery,”. Kintsugi is the Japanese philosophy that the value of an object is not in its beauty, but in its imperfections, and that these imperfections are something to celebrate, not hide.

Learning from failure is something that is often not explored honestly enough within leadership practice and something the don't spend enough time developing skills or space to do.

When I was training as a physician there was a culture within the hospital of 'Grand Rounds' where complex cases where things had gone wrong were discussed and dissected with a group of doctors from across the organisation. The aim of the grand round was to help all of us to become better doctors through open discussion of alternative investigation and treatment strategies. Grand rounds weren't about blame or recriminations, they were about learning and professionally growing. I remembered the tense nervousness of presenting to this group, feeling at times a bit under the microscope, but also the huge amount of learning I gained from the discussions with colleagues and people with vast amounts more experience than me who freely shared their wisdom. It really helped me become a better doctor. Grand rounds have structure and a environment of psychological safety amongst a professional tribe that has been curated carefully within healthcare settings, but as organisations grow and there have been changes in structures and approaches they have fallen a bit out of synch with the current culture.

Often now when I'm interviewing people for senior roles I ask the question 'what failure have you learnt most from?'. It's an interesting question and the answers give huge insight into both the individuals sense of safety in an interview and their ability to reflect on things that didn't go well in the past and what they learnt from it. Sometimes candidates struggle because they feel they have never failed, but in reality we have al had moments of failure and misjudgement and there are always lessons to be learnt.

Some of my own leadership approach and style has come from moments of failure, ideas and projects that haven't delivered or achieved what I wanted them to. Yet when I reflect on these now and think about what I might share here in this open space, I pause as I know that that in this virtual space they could be reinterpreted and misconstrued.

So this perhaps leads me to the key point, learning from failure requires organisational psychological and team safety. This is because it is one of those spaces that requires people to have a high level of trust and confidence that disclosure of failure won't lead to being labelled as incompetent or a failure. Creating psychological safety in teams and organisations is something that needs intention and focus and is a whole different blog, but it is a really important point to reflect on - do you think in your current role and leadership team that is is okay to say you made a mistake?, to share that something has failed? to explore the reasons for that failure without blame and finger pointing? If the answer to these questions is 'no' or 'not really' then the perhaps this is the point to start discussing psychological safety with your team and exploring how to create that kind of environment.

If you are lucky enough to be in a team where the answer it those questions is 'yes' then the next step is creating a structure for the discussion. Structure helps provide a frame to explore the failure and gives a stronger sense of security for those participating. This includes ground rules for the discussion as well as a format. An example of this might follow this kind of format:

• Welcome and introduction from a person who will chair the session and isn't part of the team involved in the project and will hold the room for the session
• Setting ground rules of confidentiality, respect and constructive enquiry for the discussion
• A short opening presentation of the case/situation presented by the lead for the team setting the scene and the key points.
• Each team member presents their perspective on what they did without providing too much context or rationale underpinning their decisions i.e. no excuses
• Summary of the outcome/impact from the lead of the team highlighting the points of failure or sub-optimal outcome
• Facilitated question and answer sessions focused on exploring how the decision making and project could be improved, the emphasis is on positive constructive exploration of different ways of approaching the same issue. The chair holds the room and helps support the team responding to hear the questions and probes and avoid being defensive, but acknowledging there may be good reasons an alternative course of action wasn't followed.
• Chair summarises the discussion and key learning points with specific emphasis on thanking the team for being open and their positive contribution to the organisational learning

Although these sessions should be confidential chatham house type discussions it may be organisationally wise to produce a short report focused not on the incident/project but on the key learning recommendations that goes to the corporate leadership team. This helps ensure that the leadership is aware of lessons that the organisation need to learn moving forward to avoid another similar failure happening again.

If, like many of us, you don't work in a psychologically safe leadership team or organisation, then using a professional coach or mentor can be a great way to explore and learn from failure. Alternatively if you don't feel able to do this, or don't have access to this kind of support, then using a reflective practice template can be another way to reflect on something that didn't go well and find the positive and constructive learning for your own practice in the future.

In my experience few organisations or leaderships teams create the safe environment to learn from failure, and as a result we often see repeated failures to achieve outcomes, but it is something that as leaders we should all be working towards as we learn to value our failures as much as our success and channel the spirit of Kintsugi.